Overlay Multicast Networks: Elements, Architectures and Performance

Abstract

To my beloved family. Today, the telecommunication industry is undergoing two important developments with implications on future architectural solutions. These are the irreversible move towards Internet Protocol (IP)-based networking and the deployment of broadband access. Taken together, these developments offer the opportunity for more advanced and more bandwidth-demanding multimedia applications and services, e. g., IP television (IPTV), Voice over IP (VoIP) and online gaming. A plethora of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and facilities are associated with these applications, e. g., multicast facilities, high bandwidth and low delay/jitter. Moreover, the architectural solution must be a unified one, and be independent of the access network and content management. An interesting solution to these challenges is given by overlay multicast networks. The goal of these networks is to create and to maintain efficient multicast topologies among the multicast participants as well as to minimize th