Where possible, we want to leverage the intelligence in the network to group traffic, identify available services and reduce the loads on individual receivers. We are focused on the high speed, low latency delivery of very large amounts of message traffic. With this in mind, we have reduced multi-level architectures wherever possible. The LBM design removes the need for central choke points like message servers as well as extra data copying and processing by removing the need for separate messaging daemons to filter unwanted traffic. In addition, we want the sending application to be able to control data flow as well as protocol selection. If the sending application does not want to define this, the messaging layer will pick the most efficient transport based on a set of rules built into the messaging layer, or the system administrator can configure it.

To achieve these goals, LBM has a number of unique innate capabilities including:

Support for reliable IP multicast, TCP/IP, latency bounded TCP/IP and reliable UDP unicast.
Multi-layer group addressing constructs. This allows traffic to be divided via multicast groups as well as by topics. It also allows as many topics to be supported by the messaging layer as needed by the applications. The management and support of these topics is shared through the network, with no central server needed.
Application configurable delivery guarantees allow the sending applications to decide what should happen to slow receivers and how packet recovery should be handled.
Completely symmetrical data flow: Any machine can be a sender, a receiver or both. The protocol scales across WAN boundaries and generates minimal recovery traffic.
Ability to use Rate Controls to limit both recovery traffic and sending traffic. This can be used to provide stability for the network in the case of unexpectedly high peak data flows that could push a network without rate control into a "NAK implosions" or "broadcast storm" condition.
Support for Latency bounded TCP message delivery. LBM allows the sender to decide if it wants to wait for slower TCP receivers. For more information on latency issues with TCP, please see http://www.29west.com/learn-more/white-papers/topics-in-high-performance-messaging
Automatic topic resolution. When a receiver is connected to a topic, they receive all the information needed to receive the data (address, port, etc). At this point all message routing is done by the network hardware.
Ability to link directly with your application provides a number of benefits including:
Minimal data copies
Minimal "context switches" and number of processes involved in handling each message
No new entities to manage in the network, which results in less maintenance and upgrade headaches.
True application to application messaging; no extra processes or machines sitting between the applications.
Detailed monitoring and traffic statistics accessible from the LBM API as well as using standard network monitoring applications and the ability to tie this data into a customers existing monitoring framework.

The combination of many transport models allows the 29West messaging layer to provide the approach that bests suits the application parameters and network capabilities. By providing extensive remote configuration support and management capabilities, we have reduced the time it takes to update an application and make it easy to scale LAN/WAN and other network boundaries.