TBCP is a generic Tree Building Control Protocol designed to build overlay spanning trees among participants of a multicast session, without any specific help from the network routers. TBCP therefore falls into the general category of protocols and mechanisms often referred to as Application-Level Multicasting. TBCP is an efficient, distributed protocol that operates with partial knowledge of the group membership and restricted network topology information. One of the major strategies in TBCP is to reduce convergence time by building as good a tree as possible early on, given the restricted membership/topology information available at the different nodes of the tree. We analyse our TBCP protocol by means of simulations, which shows its suitability for purpose.
This paper presents a distributed algorithm for overlay multicast tree building. The particularities of the proposed tree building method are scalability and fast convergence times, achieved through a novel strategy known as ""tree-first, split-horizon"" approach. It was published at NGC (Networked Group Communications), a special interest workshop that was well supported and attended by the computer networking research community. This paper has had a significant impact on the research community as testified by the 80 references reported by Google Scholar. RAE_import_type : Conference contribution RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics
