A balanced multicast overlay protocol - appcast

With IP multicast not gaining wide acceptance, researchers turned to alternative multicast mechanisms like application level multicast. Application level multicast (ALM) protocols arrange the participating hosts into an overlay topology; maintain it and distribute data over that topology. ALM topology building algorithms define a definite relationship among the participating members and thereby create topologies like tree, mesh, hierarchy etc. We propose a new ALM protocol, simulate the protocols and compare the results.