Abstract: Network layer multicast, i.e. IP multicast, even after
many years of research, development and standardization, is not
deployed in large scale due to both technical (e.g. upgrading of
routers) and political (e.g. policy making and negotiation) issues.
Researchers looked for alternatives and proposed application/overlay
multicast where multicast functions are handled by end hosts, not
network layer routers. Member hosts wishing to receive multicast
data form a multicast delivery tree. The intermediate hosts in the tree
act as routers also, i.e. they forward data to the lower hosts in the
tree. Unlike IP multicast, where a router cannot leave the tree until all
members below it leave, in overlay multicast any member can leave
the tree at any time thus disjoining the tree and disrupting the data
dissemination. All the disrupted hosts have to rejoin the tree. This
characteristic of the overlay multicast causes multicast tree unstable,
data loss and rejoin overhead. In this paper, we propose that each node
sets its leaving time from the tree and sends join request to a number
of nodes in the tree. The nodes in the tree will reject the request if
their leaving time is earlier than the requesting node otherwise they
will accept the request. The node can join at one of the accepting
nodes. This makes the tree more stable as the nodes will join the tree
according to their leaving time, earliest leaving time node being at the
leaf of the tree. Some intermediate nodes may not follow their leaving
time and leave earlier than their leaving time thus disrupting the tree.
For this, we propose a proactive recovery mechanism so that disrupted
nodes can rejoin the tree at predetermined nodes immediately. We
have shown by simulation that there is less overhead when joining
the multicast tree and the recovery time of the disrupted nodes is
much less than the previous works. Keywords