Survivability aspects of overlay multicasting in dual homing networks

Due to growing demand for high definition music and video content, overlay multicasting providing live streaming services has been gaining popularity in the last years. In this paper, we focus on applying overlay multicasting for delivering of critical data that require to be transmitted safely, intact and with as little delay as possible. To improve survivability of the overlay multicasting, we propose to use dual homing approach, i.e., each peer is connected to the overlay by two separate access links. We consider the following network failures: overlay link failure, uploading node failure and ISP interconnection failure. The optimization problem is formulated in form of an Integer Linear Programming (ILP) model. We introduce a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm for the considered optimization problem and compare it with optimal results provided by CPLEX solver. We also introduce several distributed tree construction strategies and conduct simulation experiments to investigate problems of providing survivability to both static and dynamic types of the network. Our studies show that the additional survivability requirements do not have a substantial impact on the overlay multicasting system expressed as the streaming cost. Moreover, the introduced heuristic method yields results close to optimal and provides better scalability comparing to CPLEX, since it can solve in reasonable time much larger problem instances than CPLEX.