Virtual Direction Multicast for Overlay Networks

In this paper we propose Virtual Direction Multicast (VDM) which aims to minimize network usage and disconnection time for video multicast applications on peer-to-peer overlay networks. It locates the end hosts relative to each other based on a virtualized orientation scheme. It builds multicast tree by connecting the nodes which are estimated to be in the same virtual direction. By using the concept of directionality, we target to use minimal resources in the underlying network. We compare VDM against a Closest Node Multicast (CNM) protocol that connects nearby nodes to construct the multicast tree. Simulation results show that our proposed technique VDM consistently outperforms CNM under different churn rates.