Study on Application Layer Multicast for Large-scale Distributed Interactive Simulation

The multicast communication allows scalable and efficient data transferring, and is an ideal supporting technology for large scale Distributed Interactive Simulation. The conventional work on multicast focused particularly on providing multicasting on IP protocol layer. However, the deployment of IP multicast requires substantial infrastructure modifications and is hampered by a host of unsolved problems. Application Layer Multicast (ALM) organizes the member hosts into an overlay network for data delivery, and all multicast related functions are performed in end systems. Therefore, ALM can be easily deployed in large-scale network. This paper presents the art of ALM and its building protocols, analyses the communication requirements of large-scale DIS applications, and the issues in implementing ALM in large-scale DIS are discussed.