SplitStream

In tree-based multicast systems, a relatively small number of interior nodes carry the load of forwarding multicast messages. This works well when the interior nodes are highly-available, dedicated infrastructure routers but it poses a problem for application-level multicast in peer-to-peer systems. SplitStream addresses this problem by striping the content across a forest of interior-node-disjoint multicast trees that distributes the forwarding load among all participating peers. For example, it is possible to construct efficient SplitStream forests in which each peer contributes only as much forwarding bandwidth as it receives. Furthermore, with appropriate content encodings, SplitStream is highly robust to…