We propose a potential application: Automobile Tracking System (ATS). In this type of application, data is generated and kept in a distributed way and can be accessed from the Internet. Searching in this system can be realized by overlay multicast....[ Read more ]

We propose a potential application: Automobile Tracking System (ATS). In this type of application, data is generated and kept in a distributed way and can be accessed from the Internet. Searching in this system can be realized by overlay multicast.

Overlay multicast is a paradigm for group communication, which shifts the multicast support from the routers to the end hosts. How to construct the overlay structure is compelling. Our goal is to construct overlay multicast structure for the ATS application, to distribute the traffic to the Internet evenly, to balance the load on the group members and to avoid network congestion.

We propose a distributed protocol in which end hosts self organize into Multiple Multicast Trees (MMT). End hosts attempt to balance the load to achieve a greater overlay efficiency. The application level performance is also considered. We present the details of our algorithms, analyze their complexity and evaluate them using simulations. Our simulation results indicate that the performance penalties are low from the network and the application perspectives. We compare our heuristic with other simple heuristics, and the simulation results indicate that our heuristic outperforms others in load balance.