What is "hypercast"

HyperCast is an overlay middleware, implemented in JAVA, for application-level overlay networks. Network applications can use HyperCast to build an overlay network on top of underlying networks, such as the Internet, without changing Internet routing or switching infrastructure. HyperCast supports multiple overlay topologies, node discovery algorithms, routing schemes, multicast models, etc. It is designed with simple interfaces between the application and overlay functions allowing developers to quickly create network applications without much knowledge of internal details of application-layer overlay networks.