Stability Oriented Overlay Multicast for Multimedia Streaming in Multiple Source Context

In this paper, we propose a new overlay multicast protocol designed for inter-active multimedia streaming applications. The protocol considers the heterogeneity of end-hosts and tries to minimize the negative impact (data outage) of end-hosts´ unannounced departures. For this purpose, it concentrates on end- hosts´ reliability (lifetime for instance) and constructs a shared tree called ms-DDBMSST (multiple-source Degree and Delay Bounded Maximum Stability Spanning Tree) as an overlay network that involves all the participants of the application, in a distributed manner. For a given set of nodes where some of them are senders, ms-DDBMSST is a spanning tree where the receive path stability of the entire tree is maximized while satisfying the delay-from-source constraint and degree constraint for each node. We believe that this is the first approach that defines ms-DDBMSST construction problem and presents a distributed protocol for the purpose. Our performance evaluation is based on experiments in both simulated networks and PlanetLab that strongly shows the efficiency and usefulness of the proposed protocol.