Extending Multicast Communications by Hybrid Overlay Network

Recently scalable streaming applications have been developed by the new emerging networking technologies. One interesting challenge is how to build an efficient and reliable network topology over heterogeneous network systems. In this paper, we argue that hybrid network overlay, via both IP multicast and overlay mesh multicast, is an important technology for group communications. In this paper, we propose a hybrid network overlay construction with three performance goals: high performance (low end-to-end transmission latency, high bandwidth mesh overlay links), low end-to-end hop count and high reliability. This paper compares the performance penalties from IP multicast, overlay multicast and hybrid overlay multicast via various topology simulations.