Design and implementation of overlay multicast protocol for multimedia streaming

In this paper, we propose a new protocol called shared tree streaming (or STS in short) protocol that is designed for interactive multimedia streaming applications. STS is a decentralized protocol that constructs a shared tree called s-DBMDT (sender-dependent degree-bounded minimum diameter tree) as an overlay network that involves all the participants of the application. For a given set of nodes where some of them are senders, s-DBMDT is a spanning tree where the maximum delay on the tree from those senders is minimized and the degree constraint on each node is held. We believe that this is the first approach that defines s-DBMDT construction problem and presents a distributed protocol for the purpose. Our performance evaluation is based on experiments in both simulated networks and real networks that strongly shows the efficiency and usefulness of STS protocol.