We study the impact of cheating nodes in application-level multicast overlay trees. We focus on selfish nodes acting independently, cheating about their distance measurements during the control phase building or maintaining the tree. More precisely, we study, through simulations, the impact of simple cheating strategies in four protocols, representatives of different application-level multicast protocol "families": HBM (a protocol based on a centralized approach), TBCP (a distributed, tree first protocol), NICE (a distributed, tree first protocol based on clustering) and NARADA (a mesh first protocol). We evaluate the impact of cheats on the performance of the overlay trees as perceived by their nodes and the underlying network.
This paper presents the first quantitative study of the impact of cheating on the structure of application-level multicast trees. Our research shows that in all cases, ALM protocols are very susceptible to structural attacks, with trees quickly exhibiting performance that is worse than if they had been randomly constructed. The evidence, as published work, is that this paper has triggered further research in the community, being the motivational basis of part of the work of Mike Afergan (PhD at MIT and Akamai CTO, USA), Dan Li (Tsinghua University, China) and Jiangchuan Liu (Simon Fraser University, Canada). Acceptance rate = 18%. RAE_import_type : Conference contribution RAE_uoa_type : Computer Science and Informatics
