Multiple Shared Trees: A New Approach to Build Application Layer Multicast Overlays

This paper introduces a new approach to build application layer multicast overlay - Multiple Shared Trees. Multiple shared trees´ approach makes tradeoffs between traditional source-based trees and single-shared tree, and between transmission efficiency and protocol overheads. We make all nodes join each shared tree, and each source node sends data on only one tree to other nodes. That is to say, although a node will join all trees but its roles on different trees are different. On a specific tree, the node is a source node and on other trees the node is a listener node. And on every tree, the source nodes are on the several highest levels, which makes the latencies much less than single shared tree. The evaluating and simulating results show the multiple shared trees can achieve less average latency significantly less while keep the protocol cost acceptable while the total number of nodes increases.