Application Layer Multicast Architecture for Media Streaming

C.K. Yeo, B.S. Lee, and M.H. Er (Singapore)

Keywords

overlay, streaming, multicast

Abstract

Application-level multicast solution using overlay is increasingly being employed as a mechanism to overcome the hurdle of non-ubiquitous deployment of multicast. Most currently proposed solutions involved the formation of a mesh upon which source-rooted distribution trees are built. In this paper, we propose ALMA (Application Layer Multicast Architecture), an application level overlay which provides ubiquitous single-source multicast to stream multimedia data using a tree-only approach. ALMA supports the building of two types of overlay trees, one of which is optimized for single performance metric such as latency or loss rate while the other is optimized for both latency as well as loss rate. ALMA protocols are designed with the ability to auto-configure a good overlay tree from the outset given the limited knowledge of the network environment and group membership. Results based on simulation show that ALMA performs competitively with ideal multicast at a cost of less than 1.5 times the network load and is far more efficient and scaleable than nave unicast. Moreover, ALMA's dual metric overlay tree delivers better QoS than its single metric based counterparts at very much the same cost.

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