Abstract

FatNemo: Building a Resilient Multi-Source Multicast Fat-Tree

Stefan Birrer, Dong Lu, Fabián E. Bustamante, Yi Qiao and Peter Dinda
Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
{sbirrer,donglu,fabianb,yqiao,pdinda}@cs.northwestern.edu
Abstract

This paper proposes the idea of emulating fat-trees in overlays for multi-source multicast applications. Fat-trees are like real trees in that their branches become thicker the closer one gets to the root, thus overcoming the ``root bottleneck'' of regular trees. We introduce FatNemo, a novel overlay multi-source multicast protocol based on this idea. FatNemo organizes its members into a tree of clusters with cluster sizes increasing closer to the root. It uses bandwidth capacity to decide the highest layer in which a peer can participate, and relies on co-leaders to share the forwarding responsibility and to increase the tree's resilience to path and node failures.

We present the design of FatNemo and show simulation-based experimental results comparing its performance with that of three alternative protocols (Narada, Nice and Nice-PRM). These initial results show that FatNemo not only minimizes the average and standard deviation of response time, but also handles end host failures gracefully with minimum performance penalty.

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Fabian E. Bustamante Last modified: Thu Jun 19 11:15:38 CDT 2003