A Protocol for Scalable Application Layer Multicast

Abstract

We describe a new application-layer multicast protocol that is specifically designed to scale to large groups. Our scheme is based upon a hierarchical clustering of the application-layer multicast peers and can be used to produce a number of different data delivery trees with specific properties. On average, group members using our protocol maintain only a constant amount of state about other group members, and incur a constant amount of control overhead. We present extensive simulations of both our protocol and the Narada protocol over Internet-like topologies. Our results show that for groups of size 32 or more, we reduce control overhead by orders of magnitude, and link stress by 25%, while retaining similar end-to-end latencies and failure recovery properties.