A Comparative Study of Application Layer Multicast Protocols

Due to the sparse deployment of IP multicast in the Internet today, some researchers have proposed application layer multicast as a new approach to implement widearea multicast services. In this approach multicast functionality is implemented at the end-hosts instead of network routers. Unlike network-layer multicast, application layer multicast requires no infrastructure support and can be easily deployed in the Internet. In this paper, we describe a set of application layer multicast protocols that have been proposed in recent literature, classify them based on some properties and present a comparison of performance and applicability of these schemes.