A Short Delay Degree-Constrained Hierarchical Application Layer Multicast Protocol

Scalability and efficiency are important for designing application-layer multicast protocol. In this paper, a short delay degree-constrained hierarchical protocol-SDDM is proposed for application-layer multicast. It adopts the idea of layer and cluster to construct multicast group members into a hierarchical architecture. When constructing the hierarchical architecture, the end host heterogeneity in bandwidth capacity is considered to achieve the high performance. During the cluster formation, it considers the underlying network properties to reduce packet delivering on costly links. In each cluster, a balanced Fibonacci multicast tree is constructed for cluster members with considering the size of cluster. Moreover, the packet processing delay is considered. The considering of underlying network properties and the construction of Fibonacci tree improve the delay performance of SDDM. The simulation shows that SDDM is an efficient and scalable application-layer multicast protocol.