A Scalable Overlay Multicast Architecture for Large-Scale Applications

In this paper, we propose a Two-tier Overlay Multicast Architecture (TOMA) to provide scalable and efficient multicast support for various group communication applications. In TOMA, Multicast Service Overlay Network (MSON) is advocated as the backbone service domain, while end users in access domains form a number of small clusters, in which an application-layer multicast protocol is used for the communication between the clustered end users. TOMA is able to provide efficient resource utilization with less control overhead, especially for large-scale applications. It also alleviates the state scalability problem and simplifies multicast tree construction and maintenance when there are large numbers of groups in the network. To help MSON providers efficiently plan backbone service overlay, we suggest several provisioning algorithms to locate proxies, select overlay links, and allocate link bandwidth. Extensive simulation studies demonstrate the promising performance of TOMA.