A Study of Distributed Low Latency Application Layer Multicast Tree Construction

We are interested in constructing low latency data delivery trees for application layer multicast (ALM). A salient feature of ALM is that it uses an overlay topology built on top of existing unicast services to bypass the need for the network layer multicast support. However, ALM protocol hosts are normally end systems that have constrained access bandwidth, processing capability and topological knowledge. These limitations suggest that the overlay structure used for data delivery must be degree-bounded, and need to be constructed in a decentralised manner using limited topology information. In this paper, we report a comparative study of a wide range of existing distributed ALM overlay construction techniques that adhere to the above requirements.