Abstract
Multicast avoids sending repeated packets over the same network links and thus offers the promise of supporting multimedia streaming over wide-area networks. Previously, two opposite multicast schemes forward-path forwarding and reverse-path forwarding have been proposed on top of structured peer-to-peer (p2p) overlay networks. In this paper, we propose a new model for optimizing application layer multicast in the context of Peer-to-Peer networks (structured and unstructured). In this contribution, we consider two approaches for multicast tree construction: a “primitive” approach, and an optimized one based on a distributed algorithm. The proposed model inherits from main P2P attributes such as: scalability, fault tolerance, while taking into consideration the respective characteristics of “one to many” and “many to many” applications. We also give a performance evaluation for validation and comparison purposes. For this we consider some main existing application layer multicast protocols.