An Overlay Tree Building Control Protocol.

TBCP is a generic Tree Building Control Protocol designed to build overlay spanning trees among participants of a multicast session, without any specific help from the network routers. TBCP therefore falls into the general category of protocols and mechanisms often referred to as Application-Level Multicasting. TBCP is an efficient, distributed protocol that operates with partial knowledge of the group membership and restricted network topology information. One of the major strategies in TBCP is to reduce convergence time by building as good a tree as possible early on, given the restricted membership/topology information available at the different nodes of the tree. We analyse our TBCP protocol by means of simulations, which shows its suitability for purpose