Application-Aware Distribution Trees for Application-Level Multicast

In this paper, we present an algorithm to construct application-aware distribution trees for application-level multicast. Unlike existing approaches, the distribution trees do not solely depend on network characteristics but also on the application semantics of the transmitted packets. In the presented algorithm, the application may specify an individual priority for each packet-receiver pair. The distribution tree is then constructed such that the higher the priority, the more direct the path from the sender to the packet\'s destination. This comes at the cost of an increase in link stress -- the more direct a path, the less likely it is that it can be integrated efficiently into an overlay multicast distribution tree. Our algorithm takes this tradeoff into account and constructs efficient application-aware distribution trees. We demonstrate the performance and characteristics of the algorithm through extensive simulation