Scaling of multicast trees: comments on the Chuang-Sirbu scaling law

  • Authors:
  • Graham Phillips;Scott Shenker;Hongsuda Tangmunarunkit

  • Affiliations:
  • USC/Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001, Marina del Rey, CA;International Computer Science Institute, 1947 Center Street, Berkeley, CA;USC/Information Sciences Institute, 4676 Admiralty Way, Suite 1001, Marina del Rey, CA

  • Venue:
  • Proceedings of the conference on Applications, technologies, architectures, and protocols for computer communication
  • Year:
  • 1999

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Abstract

One of the many benefits of multicast, when compared to traditional unicast, is that multicast reduces the overall network load. While the importance of multicast is beyond dispute, there have been surprisingly few attempts to quantify multicast's reduction in overall network load. The only substantial and quantitative effort we are aware of is that of Chuang and Sirbu [3]. They calculate the number of links L in a multicast delivery tree connecting a random source to m random and distinct network sites; extensive simulations over a range of networks suggest that L(m) ∝ m0.8. In this paper we examine the function L(m) in more detail and derive the asymptotic form for L(m) in k-ary trees. These results suggest one possible explanation for the universality of the Chuang-Sirbu scaling behavior.