GIT-CERCS-04-19
Jianjun Zhang, Ling Liu, Calton Pu, Mostafa Ammar,
Reliable End System Multicasting with a Heterogeneous Overlay Network
This paper presents PeerCast, a reliable and self-configurable peer to
peer system for End System Multicast (ESM). Our approach has three unique
features compared with existing approaches to application-level multicast
systems. First, we propose a capacity-aware overlay construction technique
to balance the multicast load among peers with heterogeneous capabilities.
Second, we utilize the landmark signature technique to cluster peer nodes of
the ESM overlay network, aiming at exploiting the network proximity of end
system nodes for efficient multicast group subscription and fast
dissemination of information across wide area networks. Third and most
importantly, we develop a dynamic passive replication scheme to provide
reliable subscription and multicast dissemination of information in an
environment of inherently unreliable peers. We also present an analytical
model to discuss its fault tolerance properties, and report a set of initial
experiments, showing the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.