A Topology-Aware Application Layer Multicast Protocol

Abstract

Application Layer Multicast (ALM) is considered as an alternative approach to IP multicast. Topology awareness is an important metric for ALM because it reduces link stress and delay stretch considerably. This work describes a novel, stable and low overhead ALM approach using binning technique to cluster nearby receivers, referred to as Bincast. Bincast uses a constant number of landmarks to cluster nearby nodes. It then constructs a k-ary tree between cluster members. The most stable node is selected as the local header in each cluster. It monitors cluster membership events and decides to split or merge the cluster if necessary. Detailed performance evaluation revealed that Bincast has lower delay stretch than similar methods with approximately same stress.