MDA - ALM: Membership Duration Aware Application-Level Multicast

ALM is proposed as an efficient alternative to overcome the deployment difficulties of the IP multicast group communication model. Even though ALM simplifies the deployment issues for a group communication by constructing an overlay network using end-hosts, it still suffers from the same rearrangement overhead due to dynamic membership of members in a multicast session. In this paper we present a new technique, called MDA-ALM (Membership Duration Aware ALM), that takes advantage of the announced membership delay of each new joining member in order to construct a more stable and robust overlay. MDA technique can be applied within any existing ALM protocol (centralized or distributed) to reduce the overall rearrangement overhead. Simulation results confirm the efficiency of our technique when applied to the centralized ALM protocol.