Resilient Peer-to-Peer Multicast from the Ground Up

Stefan Birrer and Fabián E. Bustamante
In Proc. of the IEEE Network Computing and Applications - Workshop on Adaptive Grid Computing, August-September 2004. Also published as Tech. Report NWU-CS-03-22.

Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
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Abstract

One of the most important challenges of peer-to-peer multicast protocols is the ability to efficiently deal with the high degree of churn inherent to their environment. As multicast functionality is pushed to autonomous, unpredictable peers, significant performance losses can result from group membership changes and the higher failure rates of end-hosts when compared to routers. Achieving high delivery ratios without sacrificing end-to-end latencies or incurring additional costs has proven to be a challenging task.

This paper introduces Nemo, a novel peer-to-peer multicast protocol that aims at achieving this elusive goal. We present an extensive comparative evaluation of our protocol through simulation and wide-area experimentation. We compare the performance of Nemo with that of three alternative protocols: Narada, Nice and Nice-PRM. Our results show that Nemo can achieve delivery ratios similar to those of comparable protocols (up to 99.98%) under different failure rates, but at a fraction of their cost in terms of duplicate packets (reductions > 85%) and control-related traffic. 

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