Multicast Routing in Structured Overlays and Hybrid Networks

Key-based routing has enabled efficient group communication on the application or service middleware layer, stimulated by the need of applications to access multicast. These developments follow a continuous debate about network layer multicast that had lasted for about 30 years history of the Internet. The IP host group model today still faces a strongly divergent state of deployment. In this chapter, we first review the key concepts of multicast and broadcast data distribution on structured overlays. Second, we perform a comprehensive theoretical analysis examining the different distribution trees constructed on top of a key-based routing layer. Characteristic performance measures of the multicast approaches are compared in detail and major structural differences are identified. Overlay multicast overcomes deployment problems on the price of a performance penalty. Hybrid approaches, which dynamically combine multicast in overlay and underlay, adaptively optimize group communication. We discuss current schemes along with its integration in common multicast routing protocols in the third part of this chapter. Finally, we reconsider and enhance approaches to a common API for group communication, which serves the requirements of data distribution and maintenance for multicast and broadcast on a middleware abstraction layer, and in particular facilitates hybrid multicast schemes