Underlay-robust application layer multicast

In recent years, ALM emerged as cost-efficient and scalable form of content distribution by overcoming the classical client-server bottleneck. The client bandwidth is incorporated to stream distribution, so that every client that receives the stream forwards it as well. ALM systems are usually classified in push, pull and hybrid approaches [1]. In the remainder of this article we are focusing on live-streaming, which imposes strict delay constraints on the content distribution and thus cannot be realized with pull-based approaches. Hence, we concentrate on push-based ALM that splits a stream in multiple substreams (so-called stripes) by using Multiple Description Coding (MDC) and assigns each of them a separate spanning tree. However, the results of this article apply to hybrid and partially to pull-based approaches as well.