ALMware: A middleware for application layer multicast protocols

This paper presents a new middleware called ALMware for supporting development and performance evaluation of ALM (application layer multicast) protocols on real environments. To facilitate the development of ALM protocols, ALMware provides APIs which allow protocol developers to re-use typical operations used in existing ALM algorithms. Some additional APIs for transmitting video and audio between peers also mitigate the cost of writing application codes. Performance evaluation on real environments is also supported by ALMware. To prove the usefulness of ALMware, we have implemented well-known but different types of ALM protocols, ALMI, NARADA, NICE and OMNI, and conducted various kinds of performance evaluation experiments on PlanetLab, which clearly demonstrate the usability of ALMware. We believe that this is the first effort made to develop this kind of ALM supporting middleware.