Balanced multi-domain topology-aware overlay networks in application-layer multicast

Recently, application-layer multicast (ALM) has emerged as a means to solve most of the problems of IP-based multicast. Topology-aware approach of ALM is more attractive because it exploits underlying network topology data to construct multicast overlay networks. In this paper, a novel overlay network construction mechanism called balanced multi-domain topology-aware grouping (BMTAG) is introduced. BMTAG adopts a special node (domain monitor) to be the parent of all other nodes in the same domain. The mechanism can not only save the time used to discover the topology and execute the path matching algorithm but also lower the depth of the multicast tree. Building a multicast tree with balanced traffic to avoid the bottleneck is another purpose of BMTAG. Simulation results show that BMTAG can get higher performance than TAG especially when the group size is large or the percentage of domain nodes is high.