Functional Unit Oriented Middleware for Application-Level Multicast Services

Nodoka MIMURA
Kiyohide NAKAUCHI
Hiroyuki MORIKAWA
Tomonori AOYAMA

Publication
IEICE TRANSACTIONS on Communications   Vol.E88-B    No.12    pp.4442-4450
Publication Date: 2005/12/01
Online ISSN: 
DOI: 10.1093/ietcom/e88-b.12.4442
Print ISSN: 0916-8516
Type of Manuscript: Special Section PAPER (IEICE/IEEE Joint Special Section on Autonomous Decentralized Systems)
Category: Multicast
Keyword: 
application-level multicast,  middleware,  Peer-to-Peer network,  overlay network,  

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Summary: 
Application-level multicast (ALM) is a novel technology for multipoint applications, such as large scale file distribution, video and audio streaming, and video conferencing. Although many ALM mechanisms or algorithms have been proposed, all the multicast functions have been independently developed and integrated into individual applications. In such a situation, the development of ALM applications includes a lot of redundancy. Our goal is to improve the efficiency of developing ALM applications by reducing the development redundancy and to provide application developers with a middleware on which various ALM applications can be efficiently developed with minimum efforts. To this end, we develop a functional unit oriented ALM middleware, namely RelayCast. RelayCast provides a minimum but fundamental set of functionality as a functional unit, and constructs the basis on which additional and specific functions (i.e. codec, video capture, etc.) for each application are implemented. Some functional units contain several components with different algorithms, and RelayCast meets the requirements of various applications by choosing the appropriate component. In this paper, we propose RelayCast architecture, and present the implementation and experiments of a prototype.