Multicasting Over Overlay Networks – a Critical Review
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(IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2011 Multicasting over Overlay Networks – A Critical Review M.F.M Firdhous Faculty of Information Technology, University of Moratuwa, Moratuwa, Sri Lanka. [email protected] Abstract – Multicasting technology uses the minimum network internet due to the unnecessary congestion caused by resources to serve multiple clients by duplicating the data packets broadcast traffic that may bring the entire internet down in a at the closest possible point to the clients. This way at most only short time. one data packets travels down a network link at any one time irrespective of how many clients receive this packet. Traditionally Using the network layer multicast routers to create the multicasting has been implemented over a specialized network backbone of the internet is not that attractive as these routers built using multicast routers. This kind of network has the are more expensive compared to unicast routers. Also, the drawback of requiring the deployment of special routers that are absence of a multicast router at any point in the internet would more expensive than ordinary routers. Recently there is new defeat the objective of multicasting throughout the internet interest in delivering multicast traffic over application layer downstream from that point. Chu et al., have proposed to overlay networks. Application layer overlay networks though replace the multicast routers with peer to peer clients for built on top of the physical network, behave like an independent duplicating and forwarding the packets to downstream clients virtual network made up of only logical links between the nodes. [5]. In this arrangement, the duplicating and forwarding Several authors have proposed systems, mechanisms and operation that makes multicasting attractive compared to protocols for the implementation of multicast media streaming unicast and broadcast would be carried out at the application over overlay networks. In this paper, the author takes a critical layer. The multimedia application installed in end nodes look at these systems and mechanism with special reference to would carry out the duplicating and forwarding operation in their strengths and weaknesses. addition to the display of the content to the downstream nodes Keywords – Multicasting; overlay networks; streaming media; that request the stream from an upstream node. A peer to peer network is formed by nodes of equal I. INTRODUCTION capability and act both as client and server at the same time Media multicasting is one of the most attractive depending on the function performed. Peer to peer networks applications that can exploit the network resources least while and applications have advantages over traditional client server, delivering the most to the clients. Multicast is a very efficient such as the elimination of single point of failure, balance the technology that can be used to deliver the same content to network load uniformly and to provide alternate path routing multiple clients simultaneously with minimum bandwidth and easily in case of link failures [6]. A peer to peer network forms server loading. The use of this technology is many and web an overlay network on top of the existing network TV, IP TV, web radio, online delivery of teaching are few of infrastructure. The formation of this overlay network by the them [1-4]. In all these applications, the server continues to peer to peer nodes make the resulting network resilient to deliver the content while clients can join and leave the changes in the underlying network such as router and link network any time to receive the content, but they would failures and congestion. receive it only from where they joined the stream. An overlay network is a computer network which is built Traditionally multicasting was tied to the underlying on top of another network. Nodes in the overlay can be network with special multicast routers making the necessary thought of as being connected by virtual or logical links, each backbone. Multicast routers are special type of routers with the of which corresponds to a path, perhaps through many capability of duplicating and delivering the same data packet physical links, in the underlying network. Usually overlay to many outgoing links depending on which links clients network run at the application layer of the TCP/IP stack reside downstream. Traditional IP based routers are unicast making use of the underlying layer and independent of them that receive data packets on one link and either forward that [7]. Figure 1 shows the basic architecture of an overlay packet only to one outgoing link or drop it depending on the network. The nodes in an overlay network will form a network routing table entries. Broadcasting is totally disabled in the architecture of their own that may be totally different and independent of the underlying network. 54 | P a g e http://ijacsa.thesai.org/ (IJACSA) International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications, Vol. 2, No. 3, March 2011 Even though ACOM presents several advantages such as maintenance of virtual tree in place of multicast tree bound to the physical networks, it has certain disadvantages too. The main disadvantage is the total disregard of the physical distances when setting up of the virtual tree. ACOM also has certain other disadvantages in the formation and maintenance of the ring network. Liu and Ma have proposed a framework called Hierarchy Overlay Multicast Network based on Transport Layer Multi- homing (HOMN-SCTP) [9]. This framework uses transport layer multi-homing techniques. HOMN-SCTP can be shared by a variety of applications, and provide scalable, efficient, and practical multicast support for a variety of group Figure 1: An Overlay Network communication applications. The main component of the II. MULTICASTING OVER OVERLAY NETWORKS framework is the Service Broker (SvB) that is made up of the cores of of HOMN-SCTP and Bandwidth- Satisfied Overlay Several authors have proposed protocols and services how Multicast (BSOM). The BSOM searches for multicast paths to implement overlay based multicast over the internet. In this to form overlay networks for upper layer QoS-sensitive section, an in depth analysis would be carried out on the some applications, and balance overlay traffic load on SvBs and of the most recent protocols and application in terms of their overlay links. architecture, advantages and disadvantages. HOMN-SCTP is capable of supporting multiple Chen et al., have proposed ACOM Any-source Capacity- applications on it and helps these applications meet the constrained Overlay Multicast system. This system is made up required QoS requirements. Since it is built on top of TCP, of three multicast algorithms namely Random Walk, Limited error control is totally delegated to the underlying layer. Flooding, and Probabilistic Flooding on top of a non-DHT Nevertheless HOMN-SCTP is not suitable for applications (Distributed Hash table) overlay network with simple such as streaming media that run on top of UDP. structures [8]. ACOM divides the receiving nodes into multicast groups based on the upload bandwidth of a node as Fair Load Sharing Scheme proposed by Makishi et al., the upload bandwidth is determining factor as a node may be concentrates on improving throughput instead of reducing the required to transfer multiple copies of the same packet over delay on multisource multimedia delivery such as video the uplink. The number of nodes in a multicast group hence conferencing using Application Layer Multicasting (ALM) depends on the capacity of the uplink making the nodes with [10]. This scheme is based on tree structure and tries to find higher capacity to support large number of neighbors. An the tree with the highest possible throughput. The main overlay network is established for each multicast group that objective of the protocol is to improve the receiving bit rate of transforms the multicast stream to a broadcast stream with the the node that is having lowest bit rate out of all receivers. The scope of the overlay. proposed scheme is an autonomous distributed protocol that constructs the ALM where each node refines its own subtree. The overlay network is made up of two components, The end result of this refinement of subtrees is the automatic namely an unrestricted ring that is fundamentally different refinement of the entire tree structure. from the location specific DHT based ring and the random graph among the nodes. The ring maintenance is carried out This scheme assumes that there is backbone ring network by requiring the nodes to the next node as a successor and a that has unlimited bandwidth and all the receiving nodes can few other nodes in order to avoid the problem of ring breakage connect to this ring. The links from the backbone to the end due to node leaving the network. nodes make the tree network which this protocol tries to improve for the receiver bandwidth. The end nodes initially Packet delivery with the overlay network is carried out make a basic (ad-hoc) tree network that would be improved using a two phase process. In Phase 1, packets are forwarded iteratively over time until the all the nodes receive an optimum to a random number of neighbors within a specific number (k bandwidth in terms of bit rate. Once the basic tree structure – a system parameter) of hops. This follows a tree structure of has been established using unicast links, the nodes delivery in Phase 1. For the purpose of delivery in Phase 2, the communicate with each other exchanging estimation queries ring is partitioned into segments and each Phase 1 node is with communication quality in terms of bandwidth to be made responsible for a segment and required to deliver the allocated and the delay. When a better path than that is packet to its successor which in turn forwards to its successor currently being used is found, the tree readjusts itself moving until the packet reaches a node that has already received the to the node with the better quality.