Stefan Birrer, Dong Lu, Fabián E. Bustamante, Yi Qiao and Peter Dinda
In Proc. of the Ninth International Workshop on Web Content Caching and Distribution, October 2004.

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

This paper proposes the idea of emulating fat-trees in overlays for multi-source multicast applications. Fat-trees are like real trees in that their branches become thicker the closer one gets to the root, thus overcoming the "root bottleneck" of regular trees. We introduce FatNemo, a novel overlay multi-source multicast protocol based on this idea. FatNemo organizes its members into a tree of clusters with cluster sizes increasing closer to the root. It uses bandwidth capacity to decide the highest layer in which a peer can participate, and relies on co-leaders to share the forwarding responsibility and to increase the tree's resilience to path and node failures.

We present the design of FatNemo and show simulation-based experimental results comparing its performance with that of three alternative protocols (Narada, Nice and Nice-PRM). These initial results show that FatNemo not only minimizes the average and standard deviation of response time, but also handles end host failures gracefully with minimum performance penalty.

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