Analysis of the NICE Application Layer Multicast Protocol

Application layer multicast protocols organize a set of hosts into an overlay tree for data delivery. Each host on the overlay peers with a subset of other hosts. Since ap- plication layer multicast relies only on an underlying unicast architecture, multiple copies of the same packet can be car- ried by a single physical link or node on the overlay. The stress at a link or node is definedas the number of identical copies of a packet carried by that link or node. Stretch is an- other important metric in application layer multicast, which measures the relative increase in delay incurred by the over- lay path between pairs of members with respect to the direct unicast path. In this paper we study the NICE application layer multicast protocol to quantify and study the tradeoff between these two important metrics — stress and stretch in scalably building application layer multicast paths.