Abstract

The Costs of Resilience in Overlay Mutlicast Protocols

Technical Report NWU-CS-04-50, Department of Computer Science, Northwestern University
Stefan Birrer and Fabián E. Bustamante
Department of Computer Science
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60201, USA
{sbirrer,fabianb}@cs.northwestern.edu
Abstract

One of the most important challenges of peer-to-peer multicast protocols lies in their ability to handle the high degree of transiency inherent to their environment. A number of techniques have been recently proposed aimed at improving the resilience of these application-layer approaches. However, achieving high delivery ratios without sacrificing end-to-end latencies or incurring additional costs has proven to be a challenging task. In this paper we evaluate the effectiveness of various representative protocols by contrasting their performance and associated cost through simulation and wide-area experimentation. Our results show that while it is possible to improve the resilience of an existing protocol, there are clear advantages to building resilience into a protocol from the outset. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first reported comparison of DHT-based and alternative end-system multicast schemes.

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Fabian E. Bustamante Last modified: Mon Jan 24 15:05:34 CDT 2005