An efficient load-balancing technique for overlay Application Layer Multicast

For rapid deployment of multicast application, Application Layer Multicast (ALM) is an alternate choice of IP multicast, as it supports group communication independent of network layer support. Previous studies on ALM mainly focused on achieving high throughput for bandwidth intensive applications and unfairness of communication quality is still a serious issue in multi-source communication. In this paper, we present an autonomous distributed scheme to construct an ALM tree to improve fairness and overall communication quality among the participants in a multi-source multimedia communication. Extensive simulation shows that our proposed scheme increases the incoming bitrate of the lowest recipient among all the nodes, as well as improving fairness for all receivers.