Impact of simple cheating in application-level multicast

We study the impact of cheating nodes in application-level multicast overlay trees. We focus on selfish nodes acting independently, cheating about their distance measurements during the control phase building or maintaining the tree. More precisely, we study, through simulations, the impact of simple cheating strategies in four protocols, representatives of different application-level multicast protocol "families": HBM (a protocol based on a centralized approach), TBCP (a distributed, tree first protocol), NICE (a distributed, tree first protocol based on clustering) and NARADA (a mesh first protocol). We evaluate the impact of cheats on the performance of the overlay trees as perceived by their nodes and the underlying network.