Metaheuristic Approach for Survivable P2P Multicasting Flow Assignment in Dual Homing Networks Wojciech Kmiecik, Krzysztof Walkowiak Department of Systems and Computer Networks, Wroclaw University of Technology, Wroclaw, Poland {wojciech.kmiecik,krzysztof.walkowiak}@pwr.wroc.pl Abstract. Due to growing demand for high definition music and video content, Peer to Peer (P2P) multicasting providing live streaming services has been gain- ing popularity in the last years. In this paper, we focus on applying the P2P multicasting for delivering of critical data that require to be transmitted safely, intact and with as little delay as possible, e.g., financial data, software security patches, antivirus signature database updates etc. To improve survivability of the P2P multicasting, we propose to use dual homing approach, i.e., each peer is connected to the overlay by two separate access links. The optimization prob- lem is formulated in the form of Integer Linear Programming (ILP). We intro- duce a Simulated Annealing (SA) algorithm for the considered optimization problem and compare it with optimal results provided by CPLEX solver. Our studies demonstrate that the SA method yields results close to optimal and pro- vides better scalability comparing to CPLEX, since it can solve in reasonable time much larger problem instances than CPLEX. Keywords: P2P multicasting, survivability, dual homing, protection, Simulated Annealing, overlay network 1 Introduction Nowadays, we are observing a rapid growth in popularity of multimedia streaming in the Internet. To emphasize the growing popularity of various video streaming ser- vices, we need to quote [3] where the authors claim that Video on Demand traffic will triple and Internet TV will be increased 17 times by 2015. The total share of all forms of video (already mentioned) and P2P will grow continuously to be approximately 90 percent of all global consumer traffic in the next three years. Services like IPTV, in- ternet radio, Video on Demand and high definition video or audio streaming are very useful for network users, but often require a lot of bandwidth, which can be costly [1]. The main advantages of using the P2P (Peer-to-Peer) approach are scalability, adapt- ability, low deployment cost and optimal content distribution [2], which are crucial to meet that demand. An overlay P2P multicasting technology is based on a multicast delivery tree consisting of peers (end hosts). Content transmitted by the P2P multi- casting can be either data files or streaming content with additional requirements like