Novel Network Primitives for Overlay Multicasting

We propose two novel network layer primitives, and later adopted them as the foundation for implementing our NTAG overlay multicast protocol. The notion of NTAG originates from its former version of TAG, which exploits network topology information to optimize the overlay tree in terms of delay penalty and link stress. However, NTAG has prominent advantages over traditional approaches. Unlike multicasting at the network layer, the novel primitives only belong to the control path and avoid problems pertaining to IP multicast. On the other hand, the network support significantly reduces the complexity of the overlay multicast routing algorithm. Through a large amount of simulations, we have proven that NTAG is not only efficient in its overlay transmission but also effective when supported in an incremental manner.