title: VMCast: A VM-Assisted Stability Enhancing Solution for Tree-Based Overlay Multicast.
abstract: Tree-based overlay multicast is an effective group communication method for media streaming applications. However, a group member's departure causes all of its descendants to be disconnected from the multicast tree for some time, which results in poor performance. The above problem is difficult to be addressed because overlay multicast tree is intrinsically instable. In this paper, we proposed a novel stability enhancing solution, VMCast, for tree-based overlay multicast. This solution uses two types of on-demand cloud virtual machines (VMs), i.e., multicast VMs (MVMs) and compensation VMs (CVMs). MVMs are used to disseminate the multicast data, whereas CVMs are used to offer streaming compensation. The used VMs in the same cloud datacenter constitute a VM cluster. Each VM cluster is responsible for a service domain (VMSD), and each group member belongs to a specific VMSD. The data source delivers the multicast data to MVMs through a reliable path, and MVMs further disseminate the data to group members along domain overlay multicast trees. The above approach structurally improves the stability of the overlay multicast tree. We further utilized CVM-based streaming compensation to enhance the stability of the data distribution in the VMSDs. VMCast can be used as an extension to existing tree-based overlay multicast solutions, to provide better services for media streaming applications. We applied VMCast to two application instances (i.e., HMTP and HCcast). The results show that it can obviously enhance the stability of the data distribution.
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan, China.|Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networks, Shandong Computer Science Center(National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan, China.
authors.forename: Weidong
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Gu
authors.affiliation: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networks, Shandong Computer Science Center(National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan, China.
authors.forename: Xinchang
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Department of Computer Science and Technology, Shandong University, Jinan, China.
authors.forename: Bin
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Gong
authors.affiliation: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networks, Shandong Computer Science Center(National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan, China.
authors.forename: Wei
authors.initials: W
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: Shandong Provincial Key Laboratory of Computer Networks, Shandong Computer Science Center(National Supercomputer Center in Jinan), Jinan, China.
authors.forename: Lu
authors.initials: L
authors.lastname: Wang
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D003195:Computer Communication Networks / Q000191:economics / Q000295:instrumentation; D003198:Computer Simulation; D013997:Time Factors