Improving the performance of overlay multicast with dynamic adaptation

Overlay multicast protocols should adapt to the dynamic network environment to maintain application performance. We show how end-to-end network metrics can be used in the dynamic adaptation and thus improve the performance of the direct-tree overlay multicast protocols while providing good tree quality. We propose the adaptive overlay multicast (AOM) approach that provides good tree quality and efficient adaptation. We compare AOM with a typical direct-tree protocol like HMTP (host multicast tree protocol). The simulation results show that AOM builds high-quality trees, adapts better to network conditions and is efficient.