VRing: A Case for Building Application-Layer Multicast Rings (Rather Than Trees)

  • Authors:
  • Ahmed Sobeih;William Yurcik;Jennifer C. Hou

  • Affiliations:
  • University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and National Center for Supercomputing Applications;National Center for Supercomputing Applications;University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

  • Venue:
  • MASCOTS '04 Proceedings of the The IEEE Computer Society's 12th Annual International Symposium on Modeling, Analysis, and Simulation of Computer and Telecommunications Systems
  • Year:
  • 2004

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Abstract

This paper presents the design, analysis and performance evaluation of VRing, a novel application-layer multicast (ALM) protocol that establishes a virtual ring as an overlay network among the multicast group members in a self-organizing and distributed manner. In order to reduce the routing delay of the ring overlay network, we propose to form a spare ring overlay structure that improves connectivity among group members. The design of the spare ring is justified by proposing, and analytically studying the performance of, a data delivery and duplicate suppression mechanism that makes use of both the original ring and the spare ring for forwarding data packets. We conduct simulations of both VRing and a hierarchical ALM protocol, NICE, using the J-Sim network simulator. Simulation results show that although VRing has a higher path stretch and a higher link stress than NICE, it provides less control overhead, consumes less bandwidth, and provides lower average node degree than NICE. Furthermore, VRing achieves a higher average data delivery ratio in the presence of failures than NICE. The performance improvement is especially pronounced for larger multicast groups.