Analysis of bandwidth efficiency in overlay multicasting

Overlay multicasting has been proposed for implementing multicast routing in the application layer as a practical alternative to IP multicasting. Since a packet in overlay multicasting is transmitted via unicast routing between the end hosts, the same packet can be sent over a link multiple times, and thus the main challenge in overlay multicasting is organizing the multicast delivery trees to minimize bandwidth consumption. In this paper, we present a formal analysis of the bandwidth efficiency of overlay multicasting using a simple tree construction algorithm called BestRelay. Our analytical result shows that the bandwidth consumption of overlay multicast routing can be bounded by twice that of optimal IP multicasting. This result is confirmed using simulations.