Building Bidirectional Multicast Trees Using Autonomous Reflectors

We show an active application to build bidirectional multicast trees, based on the dynamic deployment of agents on top of an active network infrastructure, and interconnected by unicast. Such trees are used to build a repair service that seeks to maintain application-level connectivity in the presence of network-level multicast failures. Reflector trees are built on demand in a decentralized way, using three elementary agent operations: clone, migrate, and merge. They terminate automatically when no longer needed. In this paper we show how agents make decisions on which set of operations to use in order to produce a low cost tree configuration, taking node and link resources into account.