The lack of proper support for multicast services in the Internet has hindered the widespread
use of applications that rely on group communication services such as mobile software
agents. Although they do not require high bandwidth or heavy traffic, these types of
applications need to cooperate in a scalable, fair and decentralized way. This paper
presents GMAC, an overlay network that implements all multicast related functionality–
including membership management and packet forwarding–in the end systems. GMAC …