Application-layer Multicast Communication

As the Internet grows up, new communication needs such as one-many data transfer applications arise, and there are three choices of multicast communication models. We present some simulations of Pure-Unicast, IP Multicast, and Application-Level multicast (ALM) over Internet-like topologies. Our results show that there is single-point bottleneck in Pure-Unicast which doesn't suits for the one-many data transfer applications, and on the contrary, IP Multicast and ALM are preferred one-many communication models.However, more than a decade after its initial proposal, deployment of IP Multicast has been limited and sparse due to a variety of technical and nontechnical reasons. Application level multicast is a new technology used for large-scale data distribution on the Internet. Most ALM protocols don't consider the node heterogeneity problem when they construct the multicast forwarding tree. In this thesis, we provide a method to solve the heterogeneity problem. Based on this method, we provide an improved protocol named ENICE, which is different in leader selection mechanism with NICE protocol. Through theoretic deduction and simulation experiments, we prove that ENICE is as same as NICE in Stress and Stretch, and better than NICE in average delay and max delay.