(Georgia Institute of Technology, 2004-05-03)
Zhang, Jianjun; Liu, Ling; Pu, Calton; Ammar, Mostafa H.
This paper presents PeerCast, a reliable and self-configurable peer to peer system for End System Multicast (ESM). Our approach has three unique features compared with existing approaches to application-level multicast systems. First, we propose a capacity-aware overlay construction technique to balance the multicast load among peers with heterogeneous capabilities. Second, we utilize the landmark signature technique to cluster peer nodes of the ESM overlay network, aiming at exploiting the network proximity of end system nodes for efficient multicast group subscription and fast dissemination of information across wide area networks. Third and most importantly, we develop a dynamic passive replication scheme to provide reliable subscription and multicast dissemination of information in an environment of inherently unreliable peers. We also present an analytical model to discuss its fault tolerance properties, and report a set of initial experiments, showing the feasibility and the effectiveness of the proposed approach.