Xcast6 treemap islands: revisiting multicast model

Abstract

Due to the complexity and poor scalability, IP Multicast has not been used on the Internet. Recently, Xcast6 -- a complementary protocol of IP Multicast has been proposed. However, the key limitation of Xcast6 is that it only supports small multicast sessions. To overcome this, we propose Xcast6 Treemap islands (X6Ti) -- a hybrid model of Overlay Multicast and Xcast6. In summary, X6Ti has many advantages: support large multicast groups, simple and easy to deploy on the Internet, no router configuration, no restriction on the number of groups, no multicast routing protocol and no group management protocol. Based on simulation, we compare X6Ti with IP Multicast and NICE protocols to show the benefits of our new model.