Providing Efficient and Reliable End-host Multicast Services on the Internet

The fast emergence of P2P services, such as P2P file sharing, P2P phone service, and P2P video streaming demonstrates its potential to deliver large files and high quality streams to a large audience. The successful commercialization of P2P audio services such as Skype illustrates the business potential of P2P services. End-host multicast, an alternative to IP multicast, becomes a natural protocol for these P2P applications that deliver data in a one-to-many fashion. However, end-host multicast avoids the deployment hurdles of IP Multicast at the cost of efficiency and reliability. In this thesis, we present a complete solution for providing efficient and reliable end-host multicast services on the Internet, encompassing protocol design, Internet reality check, protocol improvement and customization, and finally, system deployment.