An Architectural Infrastructure and Topological Optimization for End System Multicast

• Authors: S. H. Y. Wong;J. C. S. Lui
• Venue: MASCOTS '02 Proceedings of the 10th IEEE International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems
• Year: 2002

Although IP-multicast has been proposed and investigatedfor the some time, there are major problems inherentin the IP-multicasting technique, for example, scalabilityproblems, difficulty to allocate a globally unique multicastaddress, complexity to support higher level featuressuch as reliable data transfer, congestion/flow control andsecurity, and more importantly, deployment problem due toarchitectural changes to core routers. Recently, End-SystemMulticast (ESM) has been proposed as an alternative solutionso that multicasting services can be quickly deployed.In this paper, we consider the "architectural" and "optimization"issues on designing an ESM-tree. Specifically, wepresent a distributed algorithm on how to create and maintainan ESM-tree. We also propose a distributed algorithmto perform a tree optimization(TO) so that an ESM-tree candynamically adapt to the changing network condition (e.g.,drop in transfer bandwidth) so that nodes can receive themulticast data more efficiently. The propose distributed algorithmhas the theoretical properties that at all times, atree-topology can be maintained and that any node joining,leaving, as well as any tree optimization operation will not"partition" an ESM-tree. Therefore, our work can be usedto provide an efficient architectural infrastructure for ESMservices. We have implemented a prototype ESM system andcarried out experiments to illustrate the effectiveness andperformance of our ESM optimization protocol.