Enabling conferencing applications on the internet using an overlay muilticast architecture

Abstract

In response to the serious scalability and deployment concerns with IP Multicast, we and other researchers have advocated an alternate architecture for supporting group communication applications over the Internet where all multicast functionality is pushed to the edge. We refer to such an architecture as End System Multicast. While End System Multicast has several potential advantages, a key concern is the performance penalty associated with such a design. While preliminary simulation results conducted in static environments are promising, they have yet to consider the challenging performance requirements of real world applications in a dynamic and heterogeneous Internet environment.In this paper, we explore how Internet environments and application requirements can influence End System Multicast design. We explore these issues in the context of audio and video conferencing: an important class of applications with stringent performance requirements. We conduct an extensive evaluation study of schemes for constructing overlay networks on a wide-area test-bed of about twenty hosts distributed around the Internet. Our results demonstrate that it is important to adapt to both latency and bandwidth while constructing overlays optimized for conferencing applications. Further, when relatively simple techniques are incorporated into current self-organizing protocols to enable dynamic adaptation to latency and bandwidth, the performance benefits are significant. Our results indicate that End System Multicast is a promising architecture for enabling performance-demanding conferencing applications in a dynamic and heterogeneous Internet environment. *

A hybrid edge-cloud architecture for reducing on-demand gaming latency

“…Instead, works such as [20,27,51] focus on addressing the limited available bandwidth for video conferencing and video streams. We summarize their contributions in Table 3.…”

“…Peers who have a significant amount of free bandwidth can act as relays. Chu et al [20] This work evaluates the effectiveness of implementing multicast functinality at the edge. Participants organize themselves in an overlay network and adapt themselves to their application's requirements and network environment.…”

Design and Deployment of Locality-Aware Overlay Multicast Protocol for Live Streaming Services

“…End System Multicast (ESM) and its extension [4] [5] [6] give out Narada protocol and deployment for broadcasting video conference streams to a small (or moderate) group users. The main idea of ESM is that end-hosts exclusively exchange group membership information and routing information, build a mesh, and finally run a DVMRPlike(Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol) protocol to construct a overlay data delivery tree.…”

Performance Evaluation of Distributed Prefetching for Asynchronous Multicast in P2P Networks

“…For the delivery of real-time media to synchronous requests, multicast solutions (whether using network support in case of IP multicast or using end-system support through peer-to-peer networks) are attractive as they reduce both network link costs and server bandwidth requirements for serving a large number of clients [22,5,13,11]. However, a number of scenarios can be envisioned in which the client requests for streaming media objects are likely to be asynchronous.…”

“…Application-layer multicast, or overlay multicast, can facilitate the deployment of multicast-based applications in the absence of IP multicast [5]. Multicast can be achieved in overlay networks through data relay among overlay members via unicast.…”