Performance Evaluation of a Novel Overlay Multicast Protocol

The demand for high-bandwidth media streaming over the Internet is growing. For large groups of receivers, media streaming places a heavy burden on the network. IP Multicast can alleviate this problem, but it is not widely deployed. In recent years, application layer multicast and overlay multicast have been proposed as alternatives. However, there are still concerns about the efficiency, scalability and deployment of these architectures. In this thesis, a novel application layer multicast approach, called the Dynamic Meshbased Overlay Multicast Protocol (DMMP), is evaluated. DMMP establishes an overlay network core consisting of super nodes, which are end-hosts with particularly high capacities. Each super node manages a cluster of non-super nodes. We use network simulations to analyze the performance of DMMP. For that purpose, we have implemented a DMMPmodule in OverSim. OverSim is an overlay network simulation framework based on OMNeT++. We compare DMMP with NICE, a well-known application layer multicast protocol, that is claimed to achieve low link stress and low control overhead. We experiment with groups of up to 2048 members. Our results indicate that DMMP can achieve comparable service quality with less control overhead, and that DMMP has the potential to scale to a high number of receivers.