A Case for Passive Application Layer Multicast ⋆ Xiaolong Li and Aaron D. Striegel * Dept. of Computer Science and Engineering University of Notre Dame Notre Dame, IN 46556 USA Abstract Over the last few years, application-layer multicast (ALM) has emerged as a plausi- ble solution for supporting group-oriented applications. However, ALM suffers from inefficiency due to its reliance on end hosts and potentially significant changes at both the server and client applications. In this paper, we propose an approach, PALM (Passive Application Layer Multicast), that removes the need for changes to the server or client applications while allowing for dynamic discovery of supporting network devices and client-side OS modules. The passive nature of the approach comes from the fact that bandwidth savings occur transparently with zero required modifications to the networking environment, similar to approaches such as web caching. We demonstrate the performance improvements of PALM relative to ALM and compare the benefits versus network-level multicast and separate unicast ap- proaches through both simulation and experimental studies. Key words: Application Layer Multicast, QoS 1 Introduction Multicast is an efficient mechanism for group-oriented applications. However, multicast has suffered tremendous deployment issues due to its global scale [1]. Therefore, over the last few years, alternative group communication services ⋆ This research was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through the grant CNS03-47392. * Corresponding author Email address: xli5, striegel@nd.edu (Xiaolong Li and Aaron D. Striegel ). Preprint submitted to Elsevier Science 8 November 2006