User-perceived Performance of the NICE Application Layer Multicast Protocol in Large and Highly Dynamic Groups
Author: C. Hübsch, C. Mayer, O. Waldhorst links:
Source: Proceedings of 15th International GI/ITG Conference on , 62-77, Essen, Germany, March 2010
The presentation of a landmark paper by Chu et~al. at SIGMETRICS 2000 introduced application layer multicast (ALM) as completely new area of network research. Many researchers have since proposed ALM protocols, and have shown that these protocols only put a small burden on the network in terms of link-stress and -stretch. However, since the network is typically not a bottleneck, user acceptance remains the limiting factor for the deployment of ALM. In this paper we present a in-depth study of the user-perceived performance of the NICE ALM protocol. We use the OverSim simulation framework to evaluate delay experienced by a user and bandwidth consumption on the user's access link in large multicast groups and under aggressive churn models. Our major results are (1)~latencies grow moderate with increasing number of nodes as clusters get optimized, (2)~join delays get optimized over time, and (3)~despite being a tree-dissemination protocol NICE handles churn surprisingly well when adjusting heartbeat intervals accordingly. We conclude that NICE comes up to the user's expectations even for large groups and under high churn.