A Parametric Study of End System Multicast Trees in Reliable File Transfer Matthew C Brown mcbrown@ece.cmu.edu ABSTRACT There has been a wealth of work done on reliable file transfer over IP multicast. However, little research has been done on reliable file transfer over application layer multicast. Research that has been done tends to focus on the control plane of such applications, such as establishing connections, how nodes communicate, and how reliability is guaranteed. This paper attempts to examine how a wide range of parameters affect a single metric, end user time-to-download. The conclusion is that while more sophisticated algorithms do tend to perform better, random algorithms perform nearly as well.