A Comparison of Resilient Overlay Multicast Approaches

Stefan Birrer and Fabián E. Bustamante
In IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications (JSAC) -- Special Issue on Advances in Peer-to-Peer Streaming Systems, 25(9), December 2007.

EECS Department
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
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Abstract

Overlay-based multicast has been proposed as a key alternative for large-scale group communication. There is ample motivation for such an approach, as it delivers the scalability advantages of multicast while avoiding the deployment issues of a network-level solution. As multicast functionality is pushed to autonomous, unpredictable end systems, however, significant performance loss can result from their higher degree of transiency when compared to routers. Consequently, a number of techniques have recently been proposed to improve overlays' resilience by exploiting path diversity and minimizing node dependencies. Delivering high application performance at relatively low costs and under high degree of transiency has proven to be a difficult task. Each of the proposed resilient techniques comes with a different trade-off in terms of delivery ratio, end-to-end latency and additional network traffic. In this paper, we review some of these approaches and evaluate their effectiveness by contrasting the performance and associated cost of representative protocols through simulation and wide area experimentation.

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