Locality issues in reliable multicasting

Reliable multicasting based distributed simulations and conferences require safe data packet delivery in a reasonably short time. Such highquality service demands substantial network resources. As multicast applications grow, scalability is an important issue. One way to reach scalability is through clustering. The overall load is distributed among clusters, and large groups avoid overloading the network. To make clustering as natural as possible, local groups should be kept together instead of split into artificial clusters. We propose an algorithm to create a multi-level cluster structure for constructing local groups. We also simulated the cluster-building algorithm, compared it to that proposed in [9], and found that it generated more optimal clusters.<p>Godkänd; 2000; 20061128 (ysko)