Improving Efficiency of Application-Level Multicast with Network Support

Large parts of the Internet are still incapable of native multicast, and ubiquitous deployment of multicast will take a long time. There are two approaches to provide wide-area multicast service in today’s Internet. One is tunneling approach and the other is application-level multicast approach. In this paper, we focus on application-level multicast approach and propose a new scheme which improves the performance penalties of application-level multicast by making use of network support. Because in application-level multicast, endhosts provide multicast functionality instead of routers, application-level multicast delivery tree is inherently less efficient than IP multicast tree. Therefore, in our scheme, the router on the application-level multicast delivery tree alters the tree based on network-level delivery path. We evaluate our scheme with simulation experiment. Our simulation results indicate that our scheme improves the performance of application-level multicast. Further we compare our scheme to the tunneling approach from the viewpoint of transmission performances. The results reveal applicable domains of both approaches.