Deterministic formulization of bandwidth efficiency for multicast systems

End-system multicasting (ESM) is a promising application-layer scheme that has been recently proposed for implementing multicast routing in the application layer as a practical alternative to the IP multicasting. Moreover, ESM is an efficient application layer solution where all the multicast functionality is shifted to the end users. However, the limitation in bandwidth and the fact that the message needs to be forwarded from host-to-host using unicast connection, and consequently incrementing the end-to-end delay of the transmission process, contribute to the price to pay for this new approach. Therefore, supporting high-speed real-time applications such as live streaming multimedia, videoconferencing, distributed simulations, and multiparty games require a sound understanding of these multicasting schemes such as IP multicast and ESM and the factors that might affect the end-user requirements. In this paper, we present an analytical model that formalizes the bandwidth efficiency of both IP and ESM multicast systems. Specifically, our proposed formalization of the bandwidth efficiency is based on the end-to-end delays proposed by for both IP and ESM multicast systems.