Design and evaluation of a new and effective fairness scheme for multicasting in internet-scale distributed systems

Abstract

This paper argues that simply applying a multiple-tree scheme does not provide sufficient fairness for applications in an Internet-scale distributed system, in terms of performance. Motivated from the observation of the tax and donation systems in our society, we believe that a better way to define fairness, for performance's sake, is to factor in nodes' proportional contributions because it provides the opportunity to support many simultaneous multicasting sessions. This paper then presents a protocol, called FairOM (Fair Overlay Multicast), to enforce proportional contribution among peers in an Internet-scale distributed system.