Impact of virtual group structure on multicast performance

Abstract

Scalability will be a key issue in the design and the development of reliable multicast protocols for the Internet. As the geographic span and the size of communication groups increase, efficient connection management schemes including scalable error and congestion control become more and more important. Besides other approaches, several schemes based on subgrouping have been proposed to overcome the well-known implosion problem and to optimize network utilization. However, the performance of these approaches strongly depends on the virtual group structure used for local error recovery and congestion control. While a certain structure may reduce average transfer delay, another one may be suitable to decrease overall network load. This paper discusses the suitability of several metrics for subgrouping of global multicast groups and investigates the impact of virtual group structures on the overall performance of multicast communication.