mc-SPF: an application-level multicast service path finding protocol for multimedia applications

Much of the current multimedia application deployment relies on composable service systems, where complex multimedia services are composed dynamically from multiple simpler ones that may be widely distributed. Related to such a scenario is the problem of finding feasible service paths that meet end-to-end requirements. Research has been done in discovering individual (unicast) service paths. In this paper, we apply multicast at the application layer, and develop a multicast service routing protocol that builds service trees whose individual paths satisfy end-to-end service requirements. Our ns-2 simulation results show that, compared to unicast, multicast can save up to 40% in communication cost, 43% in resource usage, yet incur less message overhead.