SplitStream: High-bandwidth multicast in a cooperative environment

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 failures because a node failure causes the loss of a single stripe on average. We present the design and implementation of SplitStream and show experimental results obtained on an Internet test bed and via large-scale network simulation. The results show that SplitStream distributes the forwarding load among all peers and can accommodate peers with different bandwidth capacities while imposing low overhead for forest construction and maintenance.