Abstract
In the peer-to-peer multicast system, participants as peers are organized to construct overlay topology over physical infrastructures. In this manner, peers can easily disseminate data and gather from others by running multicast application. However, the negative impacts such as non-guaranteed transmission efficiency, heterogeneity of peers, dynamic of peers, which were related to the topology of overlay and directly affect the performance metrics, for example, the delivery efficiency and perceived quality. In this paper, we propose flexible locality-aware overlay to get better performance metrics. In the system, a peer can simply establish a streaming session and also as a source without the need of dedicated servers. The overlay is constructed with 2-layered structure to match the underlying topology and shorten the delivery paths. From the simulation results, our system has been demonstrated it had better transmission efficiency, shorter delivery delay, and higher reliability compared with those systems which have been developed. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.