A Trees-Mesh Based Application Layer Multicast Using Collaborative Sub-streams

Recently, the Tree-Mesh based Application Layer Multicast (TM-ALM) has emerged as a promising solution for media streaming over the Internet. In TM-ALM, all peers first organize an auxiliary mesh overlay, and then some 'good' peers are identified to explicitly or implicitly construct a tree(s)-based backbone. The great advantage of TM-ALM is that it has more resilient to end-hosts dynamics than tree-based approach and offers a better tradeoff between control overhead and delay performance than mesh-pull approach. However, this hybrid design brings about new issues, such as how to distinguish `good' nodes, seamless push-pull switching, as well as load-balance and fine-grained bandwidth control in backbone overlay, where we propose corresponding approaches to address these issues.Experimental results obtained via network simulation demonstrate that our hybrid solution boosts the multicasting quality and also effectively reduces the control overhead.