GPM: A generic and scalable P2P model that optimizes tree depth for multicast communications

SUMMARY Group communications (real‐time and non‐real‐time) refer to one‐to‐many or many‐to‐many communications. On the one hand, multicast is considered as an appropriate solution for supporting group communication‐oriented applications (we distinguish IP network multicast from application layer multicast). On the other hand, peer‐to‐peer model tends to be a good candidate for supporting today Internet applications (e.g. P2P IPTV, P2P VoIP, etc.). In this context, P2P has attracted significant interest in the recent years. This is mainly due to its properties that also make P2P well adapted to today social networks. In this paper, we propose GPM (Generic P2P Multicast): a novel generic and scalable approach, that optimizes multicast tree depth in P2P networks (structured and unstructured), and contributes to control the network overlay latency. For multicast tree construction, the approach we propose is based on a distributed algorithm using a specific data structures (adjacency and forwarding matrixes). GPM model inherits from P2P attributes such as scalability, flexibility and fault tolerance, while taking into consideration the respective characteristics of one‐to‐many and many‐to‐many type of applications. We also give a performance evaluation for validation and comparison purposes while considering some main existing application layer multicast protocols. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. GPM is a generic and scalable P2P model for both one‐to‐many and many‐tomany type of applications. GPM optimizes multicast tree depth while controlling the end‐to‐end delay, which is one of the main QoS parameters for realtime services (e.g VoIP). GPM approach extends the P2P routing table (e.g finger table for Chord) by combining two specific data structures: an adjacency matrix with a forwarding matrix. GPM can easily be implemented on nodes with limited capabilities (PDA, mobile terminals…). Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.