FairOM: Enforcing Proportional Contributions Among Peers in Internet-Scale Distributed Systems

The viability of overlay multicasting has been established by previous research. However, in order to apply overlay multicast to Internet-scale distributed systems, such as the Grid and Peer-to-Peer systems, the issue of effectively enforcing fairness among peers so as to optimize overall performance remains as a challenge. This paper argues that simply applying a multiple-tree scheme does not provide sufficient fairness, in terms of performance. Instead, we believe that a better way to define fairness, for performance’s sake, is to factor in peers’ proportional contributions as it provides the opportunity to support many simultaneous multicasting sessions. This paper then presents a protocol, called FairOM (Fair Overlay Multicast), to enforce proportional contributions among peers in Internet-scale distributed systems. By exploiting the notion of staged spare capacity group and deploying a two-phase multicast forest construction process, FairOM enforces proportional contributions among peers, which enables more simultaneous multicasting sessions and alleviates potential hot-spots. The simulation results of a large multicast group with 1000 members show that FairOM achieves the goal of enforcing proportional contributions among peers and does not overwhelm the peers, including the multicast source. FairOM also achieves low delay penalty for peers and high path diversity.