A fair load sharing scheme for multi-source multimedia overlay application layer multicast

IP multicasting is an efficient and scalable way to deliver high quality audio and video streams for group communication. However, widespread deployment of IP multicast is unlikely in near future and it requires substantial infrastructure modifications. For rapid deployment of multicast application, Application Layer Multicast (ALM) is an alternate choice to circumvent this situation, as it supports group communication independent of network layer support. Previous studies on ALM mainly focused on achieving high throughput for bandwidth intensive applications and unfairness of communication quality is still a serious issue in multi-source communication. In this paper, we present an autonomous distributed scheme to construct an ALM tree to improve fairness and overall communication quality among the participants in a multi-source multimedia communication. Extensive simulation and experimental results show that our proposed scheme increases the incoming bitrate of the lowest recipient among all the nodes, as well as improving fairness for all receivers.