Although IP-multicast has been proposed and investigated for years, there are major problems inherent in the IP-multicasting technique, e.g., difficulty to scale up the system, difficulty in allocating a globally unique multicast address, complexity in supporting higher level features such as reliable data transfer and congestion/flow control, more importantly, difficulty to deploy on the current Internet infrastructure due to necessity to change many core routers. Recently, End-System Multicast (ESM) has been proposed as an alternative solution so that multicasting services can be quickly deployed. In this paper, we consider the "architectural" and "optimization" issues on designing an ESM-tree. Specifically, we present a distributed algorithm on how to create and maintain an ESM-tree. We propose a distributed algorithm to perform tree optimization (TO) so that an ESM-tree can dynamically adapt to the changing network condition (e.g., drop in transfer bandwidth) s...
Starsky H. Y. Wong, John C. S. Lui