Measurement of the Effectiveness of Application-Layer Multicasting

Multicasting is the data distribution from one sender to a group of receivers. Traditionally multicasting is implemented at network layer, in the way that routers perform membership management, maintain data delivery path, and replicate and forward data. IP Multicast is the most efficient way for group data distribution. However, it has been shown that it is extremely difficult to deploy IP Multicast at a large scale. Therefore an alternative has been proposed to shift multicast support to the application layer. This approach expects end-hosts participating in the application to perform multicast functions. This is application layer multicasting (ALM). This paper proposes a proxy-based single source ALM protocol which targets media streaming applications, where latency is the overlay building metric. A text-based message exchange application is implemented based on this protocol. Some measurements are taken both on the intranet and on the Internet. And some performance data are provided. Finally we concluded our research.