An Approach to Reliability Enhancement of Overlay Multicast Trees
Liang Xie, Laurent Mathy, David Hutchison · 2003
Abstract- Application Level Multicast (ALM) makes up for the deficiencies of IP multicasting by accelerated deployment, simplified configuration and better access control at the cost of small network overhead. The userspace control of ALM allows more flexibility and scalability. Tree is the natural topology for multicast, therefore there are many efforts focusing on tree building and maintenance protocols. But tree is too fragile, and motivated by the concern of robustness we present an approach-random jump (RJ)- to enhance the reliability of overlay multicast trees. With RJ, a node receives data not only from its parent, but probably also from some other nodes in the tree. Through a series of experiments in ideal situation (in which every node has the knowledge of every other node in the same tree), we study the reliability performance gain of the tree with random jump, and analyse relations between random jump probability, node fail probability and tree reliability. Finally, some ways forRJ algorithm improvement are proposed.