Dynamic Group Membership Management for Distributed Interactive Applications

Distributed interactive applications have become increasingly popular, making it important to address their communication needs, where one of the needs is group communication. In this paper, we consider the applications in which it is at any given time possible to divide its users into groups. The group membership changes over time, and the group division is unrelated to the physical proximity. As a way of enabling the group communication in distributed interactive applications, we choose application layer multicast. We use simulation to evaluate several dynamic algorithms for managing overlay multicast trees. They are compared with respect to four metrics that can be relevant for a distributed interactive application. These are total tree cost, diameter, reconfiguration time and stability. We demonstrate algorithms that perform well for these metrics although they do not consider all users during reconfiguration.