Performance evaluation of multisource Application Layer Multicast (ALM): Theoretical and simulative aspects

Multisource ALM routing protocol is an indispensable mechanism for efficient distribution of data from many sources to many receivers. The growing of Internet multimedia applications (e.g. videoconference and multiparty online game) which demand large network resources and call for multisource multicasting, has explicitly developed the necessity of an effective method to evaluate and compare the efficiency of various multisource multicast routings. We define a routing cost to be the total number of underlying hops traversed by multicast data over a multicast delivery tree. This study explores a multiplicative property to obtain the minimum cost of various multisource ALM routing protocols by simply multiplying the number of sources to the minimum cost in the single-source multicast. From theoretical and simulative studies, the multiplicative property has been proven through examining the minimum cost of multisource multicast delivery trees constructed by different multisource ALM routing protocols with source-specific tree (SST), core-based group-shared tree (GST-C) and bidirectional group-shared tree (GST-B), which are employed in the design of multisource ALM routing protocols.