An application layer multi-source multicast with proactive route maintenance

Application layer multicast is an alternative to network layer multicast. The existing application layer multicast approaches are focus on single source multicast and insufficient in supporting distributed applications that require multi-source and fast recovery abilities with dynamic membership. This paper proposes a novel application layer multicast and its proactive recovery approaches for multi-source applications. The member in the proposed approach configures a partial tree structure for each source-specific data delivery tree, and then the cooperative execution of the proposed approach at each member defines an implicit multicast delivery tree for each source node. The implicit delivery tree structure can not only avoid bottleneck and single point-of-failure problems of single share-tree solution, but also simplify the recovery from node departures to table-lookup operations. Extensive simulations demonstrate that our proposal is effective to handle multi-source multicast delivery and reduce recovery time caused by departed nodes.