A Survey of the Research on ALM Stability Enhancement
Su Jin · Chinese Journal of Computers · 2009
Due to the increasing popularity of group communication applications in the Internet and the difficulties in deployment of IP multicast,Application Layer Multicast(ALM) begins to attract wide attention.The migration of multicast functions from routers to hosts has the potential to address most problems associated with IP multicast,but also faces with new challenges,such as the stability problem.In this paper,the authors firstly outline the data transmission model,multicast tree construction algorithms and protocol performance criterions of ALM.Then they analyze the reasons for the stability problem in depth and propose the criterion for evaluating the stability of ALM.The authors analyze the influencing factors of the ALM stability,which includes the frequency of node leave,the influencing scope of node leave and the time used to recovery ALM tree.According to the influencing factors,the technologies to enhance the stability of ALM can be classified as reducing the frequency of node leave,reducing the influencing scope of node leave and shortening the time used to recovery ALM tree after node leaves.Based on the classification,all the technologies of stability enhancement were overviewed and compared.And finally,we discuss some possible directions for future research in the area.