Impact of Cheating and Non-Cooperation on the Stability and the Performances of Application-Level Multicast Sessions

Application Level Multicast protocols construct an overlay tree between end-hosts participating in the multicast session. The efficiently of the constructed overlay tree depends entirely on the honesty and on the cooperation of all participating members. However such behavior can not be guaranteed and some selfish and non-cooperative nodes may take profit from the honesty of other members in the overlay. In this paper we investigate the negative impact of cheating nodes on the performances and on the stability ofoverlay tree constructed by our MDA-ALM protocol.