Distributed systems with different degrees of multicasting

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

The effects of multicast operations on the performance of distributed systems are evaluated by means of approximate expressions for load and delay characteristics. Different strategies for delivering items of information to large numbers of destinations, when individual transmissions may be faulty, are examined and compared. Experiments show that it is sometimes better to use large multicast groups, while in other cases it is more efficient to pass the item sequentially from node to node. The quality of the approximations is evaluated by simulations.