A comparative study of application layer multicast protocols

Due to the sparse deployment of IP multicast inthe Internet today, some researchers have proposed applica-
tion layer multicast as a new approach to implement wide-
area multicast services. In this approach multicast func-
tionality is implemented at the end-hosts instead of network
routers. Unlike network-layer multicast, application layer
multicast requires no infrastructure support and can be eas-
ily deployed in the Internet. In this paper, we describe a set
of application layer multicast protocols that have been pro-
posed in recent literature, classify them based on some prop-
erties and present a comparison of performance and appli-
cability of these schemes.