Interactive scalable crowdcasting

Supporting real-world activities online has been one of the main goals in applied computer science. However, the gathering of a large crowd for a specific purpose (e.g., lecture, concert, rally), has not yet moved online. The recent concept of crowdcasting (i.e., broadcasting to an audience while engaging them with real-time feedback) may pave the way towards it, but the audience scale and feedback fidelity are still limited by bandwidth and latency constraints. Increasing the availability of such resources thus can be important to support new forms of online activities. In this concept paper, we propose Interactive Multicast Overlay Network (IMON), a scalable approach to support crowdcasting where the number of participants can be potentially large, while the information content delivered can be rich. IMON is a peer-to-peer (P2P) overlay multicast that relies on idle peer bandwidth, and self-organizing structures to support scalable crowdcasting. The main design and challenges of IMON are described for future evaluations.