Metaheuristic Approach for Survivable P2P Multicasting Flow Assignment in Dual Homing Networks

Due to growing demand for high definition music and video content, Peer to Peer (P2P) multicasting providing live streaming services has been gaining 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 problem is formulated in the form of Integer Linear Programming (ILP). We introduce 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 provides better scalability comparing to CPLEX, since it can solve in reasonable time much larger problem instances than CPLEX.