A Study and Implementation of a New Overlay Multicast Service Network

摘要

Multicasting at the IP layer has not been adopted due to a combination of technical and economic issues. This has led to many recent efforts to focus on overlay multicast in which end systems perform all multicast communication functionalities instead of IP routers. In this paper, we propose a new proxy-based architecture of overlay multicast, which is called Overlay Multicast Service Network (OMSN). Different from the previous works, OMSN adopts both DHT-based P2P and tree-first routing protocols, that is, the P2P protocol for system management and the tree-first protocol for data distribution respectively. Thus, the system can not only keep high scalability, but also provide high effective QoS routing. In addition, using an XML-based mechanism of service customization, OMSN can deliver different formats of multimedia streams to clients with different QoS requirements. A prototype of OMSN is also implemented. Our initial experience indicates that the prototype can meet the system goal of providing a scalable, effective and adaptable multicast service platform.