Survey of Overlay Multicast Technology

IP Multicast is a technique that can transmit one copy of data traffic to multiple receivers at one time. Because it can greatly save the network bandwidth consumption as well as many applications are inherently multicast-based, it has been a research focus since the idea was proposed. However, because of many reasons, such as management, security, inter-domain routing,etc, it has not been widely deployed. Recently, many researchers have put their research focus on Overlay Multicast. In Overlay Multicast, the data replication, multicast routing, group management, and other functions are all achieved at application layer. Because it does not require to change the current Internet infrastructure, it can easily be deployed. Since the idea was proposed, many overlay multicast ideas have been proposed. They differ in multicast tree formation, underlayer support, etc. In this paper, we did a systematic research on available overlay multicast technologies. We classify them based on their different characteristics and present the different ideas of these protocols.