High-bandwidth mesh-based overlay multicast in heterogeneous environments
Bartosz Biskupski, Raymond Cunningham, Jim Dowling, René Meier · 2006
In this paper we present MeshCast, a peer-to-peer (p2p) multicast protocol for applications requiring high bandwidth (such as live video streaming) from a server to a large number of receivers. Traditional tree-based approaches to overlay multicast inefficiently utilise the outgoing bandwidth of participating nodes and poorly adapt to node membership churn. In contrast, MeshCast is based on Chainsaw mesh-based approach to data delivery that better utilises bandwidth and provides excellent adaptation properties. In this paper we identify properties that enable mesh-based overlay multicast protocols to better utilise the available bandwidth and consequently support higher data stream rates in heterogeneous environments. MeshCast uses a gossip-based algorithm to adapt the overlay to peer heterogeneity, while still preserving the advantages of a mesh-based overlay. Our experiments show that MeshCast can support 68% higher stream rates and provides a 22% improvement in buffering delay over the recently proposed Chainsaw protocol for a heterogeneous node bandwidth distribution.