TOMA: A Viable Solution for Large-Scale Multicast Service Support

In this paper, we propose a Two-tier Overlay Multicast Architecture (TOMA) to provide scalable and efficient multicast support for various group communication applications. In TOMA, Multicast Service Overlay Network (MSON) is advocated as the backbone service domain, while end users in the access domains form a number of small clusters, in which an application-layer multicast protocol is used for the communication between the clustered end users. TOMA is able to provide efficient resource utilization with less control overhead, especially for large-scale applications. It also alleviates the state scalability problem and simplifies multicast tree construction and maintenance when there are large numbers of groups in the networks. Simulation studies are conducted and the results demonstrate the promising performance of TOMA.