A Hybrid P2P Protocol for Real-Time Collaboration

Peer-to-peer architecture is currently an attractive solution for facilitating the use of collaboration software without any server. Multicasting is usually proposed for group communication, such as IP multicasting, which is the most efficient way to disseminate collaboration data as it eliminates traffic redundancy and improves bandwidth utilization. But due to scalability and deployment issues, an alternative has been addressed to shift IP multicasting to application layer multicasting (ALM) with the collaboration between the end hosts, the latter also known as P2P. This paper focuses on design and implementation of a hybrid Peer-to-peer collaboration platform to share group data. Here, we present Fault Tolerant ALM (FT-ALM) architecture for content distribution. Multiple-server based FT-ALM improves cumulative end-to-end latency by reflecting physical network topology on to the overlay network structure. Resilience is ensured through backup policy. The effectiveness of FT-ALM is tested through extensive simulation