Overlay mesh construction using interleaved spanning trees

In this paper we evaluate a method of using interleaved spanning trees to compose a resilient, high performance overlay mesh. Though spanning trees of arbitrary type could be used to construct an overlay mesh, we focus on a distributed algorithm that computes k minimum spanning trees on an arbitrary graph. The principal motivation behind this strategy is to provide applications with a k-redundant, high quality mesh suitable for demanding applications like A/V broadcast, video conferencing, data collection, multi-path routing, and file mirroring/transfer. We elaborate details of k-MST, pointing out advantages and potential problem points of the protocol, and then analyze its performance using a variety of metrics with simulation as well as a functional PlanetLab implementation.