Bandwidth Adapted Hierarchical Multicast Overlay

As the infrastructure-centric model of peer-to-peer streaming, recent overlay construction schemes compose a hierarchical topology of peers by grouping them into clusters. There is a server in each cluster that receives data from the source and relays it to its cluster members. In this paper, we propose an alternative infrastructure-centric peer-to-peer framework called BAHMO that constructs a hierarchical multicast tree. BAHMO does not utilize server bandwidth and rely only on peer bandwidth for data transfers. It achieves both the stability of the infrastructure-centric model and the bandwidth efficiency of the fully-distributed model. Bandwidth assignment for inter-cluster data transfers affects the performance of BAHMO. We propose a bandwidth transfer scheme that results in bandwidth adaptation along the global overlay of BAHMO that removes the requirement for change in the global overlay due to peer dynamics. We evaluate BAHMO in a number of network topologies in terms of bandwidth requirements.