GeoCast: An Efficient Overlay System for Multicast Applications

In this paper, we present GeoCast, a geographical location aware overlay network framework designed for providing efficient group communication services. GeoCast can be seen as an extension to the CAN network in the term of topology management and routing protocol. Geocast design has three important properties that attractive to group communication applications. First, it uses geographical mapping of nodes to regions to take advantage of the similarity between physical and network proximity. Second, a shortcut enabled geo-distance routing protocol is employed in GeoCast, which is more resilient than Chord-like or Pastry-like overlay networks due to the availability of multiple independent routing paths. Third and most importantly, a novel routing table management scheme is designed to allow the applications based on that have ability to manage their maintenance overhead in terms of network resource constrains.