The use of Application Level Multicast (ALM) is extremely promising for content distribution.F or these applications appropriate
cost functions for deciding between different ALM tree configurations are required, and for these cost functions bandwidth
measurement mechanisms are most likely to be important.Existing end-to-end measurement techniques cannot address several ALM
and network topology scenarios. Enhancing existing techniques with cooperation mechanisms allows them to cope with the specificity
of ALM, namely with transport link sharing.Sim ulation results indicate that these techniques can produce estimates with reasonable
accuracy.
Rui J.Lop es is the recipient of a PhD grant (PRAXIS XXI) from the Portuguese Science and Technology Ministry (MCT)