User-perceived performance of the NICE application layer multicast protocol in large and highly dynamic groups

Abstract

The presentation of a landmark paper by Chu et al. at SIGMETRICS 2000 introduced application layer multicast (ALM) as completely new area of network research. Many researchers have since proposed ALM protocols, and have shown that these protocols only put a small burden on the network in terms of link-stress and -stretch. However, since the network is typically not a bottleneck, user acceptance remains the limiting factor for the deployment of ALM. In this paper we present an in-depth study of the user-perceived performance of the NICE ALM protocol. We use the OverSim simulation framework to evaluate delay experienced by a user and bandwidth consumption on the user's access link in large multicast groups and under aggressive churn models. Our major results are (1) latencies grow moderate with increasing number of nodes as clusters get optimized, (2) join delays get optimized over time, and (3) despite being a tree-dissemination protocol NICE handles churn surprisingly well when adjusting heartbeat intervals accordingly. We conclude that NICE comes up to the user's expectations even for large groups and under high churn. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2010.