DIG: an overlay network for Internet multicasting

Multicast has been of great interest within the research community. It is more convenient to implement the multipoint delivery service in end hosts than in the intermediate routers. In this paper, we propose an application-level multicast architecture (called DIG). DIG is a hierarchy which consists of many local overlay networks. In each local network, we develop an application-level protocol to construct the distribution architecture. Simulation results show that DIG is effective from the view of delay penalty and resource usage, and the hierarchy does not obviously affect the performance and efficiency, so DIG is scalable. We also implement an infrastructure service of DIG protocol to work with multicast applications such as white-board and network television.