Topology-Aware Optimal Subgrouping and Subscheduling for Generalized Explicit Multicasting on Internet

eXplicit multicasting (Xcast) is a protocol to send data to multiple receivers in an efficient way. Compared with traditional stateful multicast, Xcast is based on a stateless approach that scales better in number of groups. Unfortunately, the original Xcast brings up new challenges such as the scalability of group size and efficiency issue. Therefore, Multiple Xcast (MXcast) and Generalized Xcast (GXcast) were proposed to retard the limitation of the group size by reconstructing the multicast group into multiple subgroups and transferring multiple Xcast packets to different subgroups, respectively. In this paper, we propose various subgrouping schemes and evaluate their performance based on hybrid simulation experiments. The results show that it can save up to 36.7% bandwidth consumption from Xcast to our proposed Optimal GXcast in Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP). The results reflect that the proposed scheme can improve the scalability of group size, achieve minimal packet delivery latency, reduce both network bandwidth consumption and source loading compared with the unicast and original Xcast, MXcast, and GXcast.