MAMBO: Membership-Aware Multicast With Bushiness Optimisation

Multicast is a key component of applications such as multimedia streaming, multi-player gaming and generic publish-subscribe and event notification services. IP multicast has a number of technological, practical, and business obstacles, and thus is not widely used. An alternative, Application-Level Multicast (ALM), has been proposed to support similar functionalities. A survey of existing ALM systems indicates that many ALM systems are built on P2P overlay infrastructures and construct multicast trees among application participants. This paper presents Membership-Aware Multicast (MAM) and MAM with Bushiness Optimisation (MAMBO), which reuse the communication structure of a tree-based ALM system to track group membership, i.e. to record when peers join or leave the group.