Abstract

This paper presents a subscription-based overlay network that supports efficient any-source multicast. The system lets users register to a central server and allows the server to incrementally build a topology graph that contains the network connections among the subscribers. With this topology graph in place, we address the challenges of minimizing network traffic and the delay incurred in broadcasting a data packet to all active subscribers. The active subscribers are organized in a directional ring, and for each of them, we find a number of predecessors and successors, the number of which depends on the subscriber's network capacity. When a node sends a packet, the packet is routed along the ring and to its successors simultaneously. To minimize the delay in data forwarding, we take network proximity into consideration when constructing ring and selecting a subscriber's successors and predecessors. In addition to being topology-aware, the proposed system also features leveraging idling nodes for data forwarding. More specifically, the subscribers who are online but not participating in application services (e.g., gaming) are recruited to reduce network traffic and further reduce data latency.