A comparative study of multicast protocols: top, bottom, or in the middle?

Multicast solutions have been evolving from "bottom" to "top", i.e., from IP layer (called IP multicast) to application layer (referred to as application layer multicast). Recently, there are some new proposals (named as overlay multicast) using certain "infrastructure" (composed of proxies) in the middle. Although it is well accepted that application layer multicast and overlay multicast are easier to deploy while sacrificing bandwidth efficiency compared with IP multicast, little research has been done to systematically evaluate and compare their performance. In this paper, we conduct a comparative study of different types of multicast routing protocols. We first present a qualitative comparison of three types of protocols, and then we provide a quantitative study of four representative protocols, namely, PIM-SSM, NARADA, NICE, and POM by extensive simulations. Our studies will help to answer some of the most important questions, such as which way to go: top, bottom, or in the middle?.