Network-Aware Overlay Multicast for Large Data Dissemination

In this paper, we propose a network-aware overlay multicast (NAOM) technique for large data dissemination in a well-managed overlay network. To improve the throughput, NAOM utilizes forward-only hosts; these hosts participate in the overlay network but are not members of the multicast. With the inclusion of the forward-only hosts, data slices can detour bottleneck links and more resources can be used to build efficient multicast trees. Large data are divided into fixed-size slices, and the slices are delivered simultaneously to multicast receivers along the multiple multicast trees. We model the problem of building efficient multicast trees with the inclusion of forward-only hosts. The problem is an NP-hard problem, and we introduce a polynomial time heuristic algorithm. Furthermore, we propose a dynamic scheduling scheme for the transfer of data along the evaluated multicast trees. Our experimental results in a real network environment show an improvement of the throughput but at the cost of additional resource consumption of forward-only nodes.