Scalable Island Multicast for Peer-to-Peer Streaming

Xing Jin,Kan-Leung Cheng,S.-H Gary Chan

doi:10.1155/2007/78913

Abstract

Despite the fact that global multicast is still not possible in today's Internet, many local networks are already multicast-capable (the so-called multicast “islands”). However, most application-layer multicast (ALM) protocols for streaming have not taken advantage of the underlying IP multicast capability. As IP multicast is more efficient, it would be beneficial if ALM can take advantage of such capability in building overlay trees. In this paper, we propose a fully distributed protocol called scalable island multicast (SIM), which effectively integrates IP multicast and ALM. Hosts in SIM first form an overlay tree using a scalable protocol. They then detect IP multicast islands and employ IP multicast whenever possible. We study the key issues in the design, including overlay tree construction, island management, and system resilience. Through simulations on Internet-like topologies, we show that SIM achieves lower end-to-end delay, lower link stress, and lower resource usage than traditional ALM protocols.

Highlights

With the popularity of broadband Internet access, there has been increasing interest in media streaming services
A limitation of lateral error recovery (LER) is that the trees in different planes should be of similar sizes
A host is connected to a unique stub router with 1 millisecond delay, while the delays of core links are given by the topology generator

Summary

Introduction

With the popularity of broadband Internet access, there has been increasing interest in media streaming services. In a P2P streaming system, cooperative peers self-organize themselves into an overlay network via unicast connections. They cache and relay data for each other, thereby eliminating the need for powerful servers from the system. There are two types of overlays for P2P streaming: tree structure and gossip mesh. The gossipbased approaches achieve high resilience to network and group dynamics. They have high control overhead due to data scheduling and mesh maintenance. They have high playback delay because in the gossip mesh a host may not always find close peers as their neighbors. We consider a tree-based approach in this paper

Methods

Results

Discussion

Conclusion