Media distribution using overlay multicast and peer-to-peer technologies

The explosive growth of multimedia services and applications (e.g. media streaming) demands an efficient, deployable media distribution system on the Internet. Although native IP multicast is regarded as an efficient way of delivering media streams to a group of receivers, it faces a number of technical and operational issues which have eventually prevented its widespread usage. The aim of this work is therefore to build a scalable, efficient, reliable and incrementally deployable infrastructure for supporting media distribution services. In this thesis, a new framework named Dynamic Mesh-based overlay Multicast Protocol (DMMP) framework, and two important extensions to the basic DMMP protocol, namely Self-improved DMMP protocol (DMMP+) and Interest-shared Group Management (IGMT) protocol for DMMP, are developed to efficiently serve a large number of concurrent clients with relatively high inbound bandwidth and low start-up delay. The DMMP framework dynamically manages a two-tier hierarchy, i.e., an overlay core so-called dynamic mesh, and clusters without relying on classic IP multicast. The key idea is to let a number of end hosts get selected and self-organized into the overlay hierarchy, and dynamically maintain such a hierarchy. In comparison to prior application layer multicast protocols, DMMP is more adaptive to group size changes, and provides efficient and reliable media delivery with less control overhead and less packet loss. DMMP+ extends the basic protocol in the DMMP framework to optimize the data delivery hierarchy. Two self-improvement techniques are designed to gradually optimize the established overlay mesh and clusters. The analysis identifies that the DMMP+ protocol can assist the DMMP framework to be more scalable, reliable and efficient in the sense of providing better data path quality but less control overhead and packet loss. The IGMT protocol further extends DMMP+ to help the transient or partitioned nodes quickly join/rejoin the group in a highly dynamic environment. Motivated by an experimental investigation on Joost’s peer-to-peer management, IGMT allows nodes to maintain interest-shared groups and to establish shortcuts in addition to relying on centralized servers to join the group. The simulation results have demonstrated that IGMT is efficient and resilient to highly dynamic membership changes. The combination of these new approaches constitutes a coherent and effective media distribution