PhD Qualifying Examination


"Loss Recovery and Load Balancing for Application-layer Multicast"

By Mr. Xing Jin


Abstract:

Application-layer multicast (ALM) has been proposed to circumvent
the current limitations in IP multicast, where multicast tree is
built from one host relaying packets to another using unicasts.
Most of the ALM protocols proposed focus on constructing tree to
span the users. In order for ALM to be successful, QoS beyond
connectivity aspect should be addressed. We survey two aspects of
QoS in this paper: error recovery and load-balancing.

Since hosts may fail and packets may be lost, we survey a number
of loss recovery mechanisms as applied in ALM to mitigate the
adverse effects when these happen. These include OverQoS (based on
FEC and ARQ), probabilistic resilient multicast (PRM), lateral
error recovery (LER), and CoopNet (based on multiple description
coding). An ALM protocol should also be designed so as not to load
a particular host whose out-degree is limited by its processing or
network bandwidth. We present several load balancing mechanisms
for that, namely, degree-bounded spanning tree, forwarding
delegation, and dynamic fanout improvement as applied in Nice,
Narada etc.


Date:     		Wednesday, 17 December 2003

Time:                   10:00a.m.-12:00noon

Venue:                  Room 1403
			lifts 25-26

Committee Members:      Dr. Gary Chan (Supervisor)
                        Dr. Jogesh Muppala (Chairman)
			Dr. Mounir Hamdi
			Prof. Lionel Ni


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