What a mesh: understanding the design tradeoffs for streaming multicast

Cooperative end-system multicast (CEM) is a promising paradigm for Internet video distribution. Several CEM systems have been proposed and deployed, but the tradeoffs inherent in the different designs are not well understood. In this work, we provide a common framework in which different CEM design choices can be empirically and systematically evaluated. Based on our results, we conjecture that all CEM systems must abide by a set of fundamental design constraints, which we express in a simple model. By necessity, existing system implementations couple the data- and control-planes and often use different transport protocols.