HostCast: a new overlay multicasting protocol

Zhi Li, Prasant Mohapatra

Abstract: Though the merits of IP-based multicast are undeniable, the deployment of IP multicast has met many difficulties. In the past several years, lots of research works have been done on overlay multicast. In this paper, we propose a new overlay multicast protocol: HostCast. Besides constructing a data delivery tree, HostCast uses a simple and efficient approach to form an overlay mesh for control and maintenance. The mesh can effectively facilitate the overlay multicasting. HostCast improves the reliability of overlay multicast tree and decreases the convergence time as demonstrated by the results obtained via simulation.