On construction of service multicast trees

Internet heterogeneity has been a major problem in multimedia data delivery. To deal with the problem, overlay proxy networks as well as distributed and composable services across these overlay networks are being deployed. This solution however, implies that the overlay networks must support not only data multicast for data delivery to a group of destinations, but also service multicast (incorporate services in the distribution tree) for semantic data transformations in order to deal with Internet heterogeneity. This paper presents challenges and solutions for building service multicast trees. We compare two groups of algorithms, the shortest-service-path-tree (SSPT) algorithm and the longest-match (LM) algorithm. Simulation results show trade-offs between complexity and overall tree performance, as well as cost differences when further refinements of the LM approach are considered.