Analysis of the NICE Application Layer Multicast Protocol

Application layer multicast protocols organize a set of hosts intoan overlay tree for data delivery. Each host
on the overlay peers with a subset of other hosts. Since
application layer multicast relies only on an underlying
unicast architecture, multiple copies of the same packet
can be carried by a single physical link or node on the
overlay. The stress at a link or node is defined as the
number of identical copies of a packet carried by that
link or node. Stretch is another important metric in
application layer multicast, which measures the relative
increase in delay incurred by the overlay 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.
Also UMIACS-TR-2002-60