SelectCast: a scalable and self-repairing multicast overlay routing facility

In this paper we describe SelectCast, a self-repairing multicast overlay routing facility for supporting publish/subscribe applications. Select Cast is a peer-to-peer protocol, and lever-ages Astrolabe, a secure distributed information management system. SelectCast uses replication to recover quickly from transient failures, as well as Astrolabe's aggregation facilities to recover from long-term failures or adapt to changes in load or QoS requirements. In order to evaluate the scalability and performance of SelectCast, and compare these with other multicast facilities, we built a multicast testing facility on NetBed. This paper reports latency and load results for SelectCast, compared to both native IP multicast and Yoid.