A performance comparison of native IP Multicast and IP Multicast tunneled through a Peer-to-Peer overlay network

We have developed the multicast middleware, a bridge between IP multicast and a self-organizing overlay multicast infrastructure, in order to make IP multicast available to the end user.We compare the performance of native IP multicast and IP multicast tunneled through a P2P overlay multicast network using the multicast middleware. We show that the achievable throughput can be quite high when using overlay multicast for data transport together with the IP multicast API and that the latency introduced by processing (en- and decapsulation) and tunneling the captured packets can be negligible.