On the efficiency of multicast

Author

Van Mieghem, Piet ; Hooghiemstra, Gerard ; Van der Hofstad, Remco

Author_Institution

Fac. of Inf. Technol. & Syst., Delft Univ. of Technol., Netherlands

Volume

9

Issue

6

fYear

2001

fDate

12/1/2001 12:00:00 AM

Firstpage

719

Lastpage

732

Abstract

The average number of joint hops in a shortest-path multicast tree from a root to m arbitrary chosen group member nodes is studied. A general theory for all graphs, hence including the graph representation of the Internet, is presented which quantifies the multicast reduction in network links compared to m times unicast. For two special types of graphs, the random graph G_p(N) and the k-ary tree, exact and asymptotic results are derived. Comparing these explicit results with previously published Internet measurements indicates that the number of routers in the Internet that can be reached from a root grows exponentially in the number of hops with an effective degree of approximately 3.2

Keywords

Internet; graph theory; multicast communication; telecommunication network routing; Internet; Internet measurements; graph representation; graph theory; k-ary tree; multicast efficiency; multicast network links; random graph; routers; shortest-path multicast tree; unicast; Application software; Consumer electronics; IP networks; Internet; Motion pictures; Multicast protocols; TV; Tree graphs; Unicast; Videoconference;

fLanguage

English

Journal_Title

Networking, IEEE/ACM Transactions on

Publisher

ieee

ISSN

1063-6692

Type

jour

DOI

10.1109/90.974526

Filename

974526