We presented ALMI, an application level multicast infrastructure, that
has been designed and built to provide a solution for multi-sender
multicast communication which scales to a large number of
communication groups with small numbers of members, and does not
depend on multicast support at the IP layer. This solution provides a
multicast middleware which is implemented above the sockets layer.
Application level multicast offers accelerated deployment, simplified
configuration and better access control. Since application level
multicast is implemented in user space, it allows more flexibility in
customizing some application related modules, e.g. data transcoding,
error recovery, flow control, scheduling, differentiated message
handling and security. The initial experimentation results showed that
the ALMI multicast tree is able to track the underlying network
dynamics and adapts well to changes in the network.