Description

Abstract:

The efficiency of end-to-end multicast transport protocols depends critically upon their ability to

scale efficiently to a large number of receivers. Several research multicast protocols attempt to

achieve this high scalability by identifying sets of co-located receivers in order to enhance loss

recovery, congestion control and so forth. A number of these schemes could be enhanced and

simplified by some level of explicit knowledge of the topology of the multicast distribution tree,

the value of the bottleneck bandwidth along the path between the source and each individual

receiver and the approximate location of the bottlenecks in the tree. In this paper, we explore the

problem of inferring the internal structure of a multicast distribution tree using only observations

made at the end hosts.