Performance Evaluation

In this section, we first evaluate the performance of P2Cast through simulation experiments. We then compare three overlay construction algorithms: BF, BF-delay, and BF-delay-approx. In our simulation results, the half-width of the 95% confidence interval of the data shown in this paper is always less than 5% of the point estimate. The experiments show that (1) P2Cast is more scalable than either a client-server unicast approach, or an IP multicast-based patching approach; (2) the larger threshold helps to serve more clients in P2Cast; and (3) under the same conditions, BF-delay and BF-delay-approx algorithm can serve more clients than BF and reduce the overall network workload over BF. However, they present a higher workload to the server than BF. We will address the failure recovery problem in the Section 5. For now we assume that no client departs early and that there are no network failures. We start with the introduction of the simulation setting.