An architecture for wide-area multicast routing

IEEE/ACM Transactions on Networking, 1996

The purpose of multicast routing is to reduce the communication costs for applications that send the same data to multiple recipients. Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not efficient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the router state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. Our protocol independent multicast (PIM) architecture: a) maintains the traditional IP multicast service model of receiverinitiated membership, b) supports both shared and source-specific (shortest-path) distribution trees, c) is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol, and d) uses soft-state mechanisms to adapt to underlying network conditions and group dynamics. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well-suited to large heterogeneous internetworks.

10th International Conference on Telecommunications, 2003. ICT 2003., 2003

Recently several multicast mechanisms , known as small group multicast, were proposed that scale better with the number of multicast sessions than traditional multicast does. In this paper, we propose a new approach, Simple Explicit Multicast (SEM), which uses an efficient method to construct multicast trees and deliver multicast packets. SEM is original because it adopts the source-specific channel address allocation, reduces forwarding states in non branching node routers and implements data distribution using unicast trees.

Computer Communications, 1999

The exploding Internet has brought many novel network applications. These include teleconferencing, interactive games, the voice/video phone, real-time multimedia playing, distributed computing, web casting, and so on. One of the specific characteristics of these applications is that all involve interactions among multiple members in a single session. Unlike the traditional one-to-one message transmission (unicasting), if the underlying networks provide no suitable protocol supports, these applications may be costly and infeasible to implement.

Computer Networks, 2000

Multicast routing, once dominated by a single routing protocol, is becoming increasingly diverse. It is generally agreed that at least three routing protocols, PIM, DVMRP, and CBT will be widely deployed and must interoperate. This signals a shift from the Mbone as one large domain to a collection of administrative domains where each domain selects its own multicast routing protocol.

IEEE Transactions on Parallel and Distributed Systems, 2008

In this paper, we present a new multicast architecture and the associated multicast routing protocol for providing efficient and flexible multicast services over the Internet. Traditional multicast architectures construct and update the multicast tree in a distributed manner, which causes two problems: first, since each node has only local or partial information on the network topology and group membership, it is difficult to build an efficient multicast tree; second, due to lack of the complete information, broadcast is often used when transmitting control packets or data packets, which consumes a great deal of network bandwidth. In the newly proposed multicast architecture, a few powerful routers, called m-routers, collect multicast-related information and process multicast requests based on the information collected. m-routers handle most of multicast related tasks, while other routers only need to perform minimum functions for routing. m-routers are designed to be able to handle simultaneous many-to-many communications efficiently. The new multicast routing protocol, called Service Centric Multicast Protocol (SCMP), builds a dynamic shared multicast tree rooted at the m-router for each group. The multicast tree can satisfy the QoS constraint on maximum end-to-end delay and minimize tree cost as well. The tree construction is performed by a special type of self-routing packets to minimize protocol overhead. Our simulation results on NS-2 demonstrate that the new SCMP protocol outperforms other existing protocols and is a promising alternative for providing efficient and flexible multicast services over the Internet.

Multicast is a common platform for supporting group communication applications, such as IPTV, multimedia content delivery, and location-based advertisements. Distributed hash table (DHT) based overlay networks such as Chord and CAN presents a popular distributed computing architecture for multicast applications. However, existing research efforts have been mostly dedicated to efficient message delivery techniques to alleviate the influence of network dynamics on geo-distance based routing, such as reducing the delivery path length or optimizing routing path by utilizing network locality.

Proceedings of the IEEE

Multicasting is a mechanism to send data to multiple receivers in an efficient way. In this paper, we give a comprehensive survey on network and transport layer issues of Internet multicast. We begin with a brief introduction to the current Internet protocol multicast model-the "host group" model and the current Internet multicast architecture, then discuss in depth the following three research areas: 1) scalable multicast routing; 2) reliable multicast; and 3) multicast flow and congestion control. Our goal is to summarize the state of the art in Internet multicast and to stimulate further research in this area.

Proceedings 1997 International Conference on Network Protocols, 1997

The IP-multicast architecture i s extended with addressing information along multicast routing trees that permits more eficient and sophisticated multicast routing options and encourages communication and cooperation between IP and higher-layer protocols. The Addressable Internet Multicast (AIM) architecture is introduced that enables sources to restrict the delivery of packets to a subset of the receivers in a multicast group on a per-packet basis, permits receivers to listen to subsets of sources on a subscription basis, provides nearest-host routing, and allows higher-layer protocols to place packets into application-defined logical streams, so that hosts may direct the multicast routing of packets based on application-defined contexts. In addition, the Reliable Multicast Architecture (RMA) i s introduced to support end-toend reliable multicasting using heterogeneous reliable multicast protocols and providing acknowledgment trees implicitly, thereby eliminating the ACK implosion problem and allowing NAK-avoidance algorithms to work within local groups.

Global Telecommunications Conference, 2002. GLOBECOM '02. IEEE, 2002

Source Specific Multicast (SSM) is a viable solution for current multicast applications, since the driving applications to date are one to many, including Internet TV, distance learning, file distribution and streaming media, etc. It brings many benefits in billing, address allocation, and security. However, SSM still confronts the serious state scalability problem when there are a large number of simultaneous on-going multicast groups in the network. In this paper, we propose a protocol to improve the state scalability of Source Specific Multicast, which is called Aggregated Source Specific Multicast (ASSM). We design the detailed ASSM protocol and show that our solution can obtain significant multicast state and tree management overhead reduction while achieving transparency to end-users, compatibility with existing multicast technologies and low overhead.

1998

Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not e cient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that e ciently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. E ciency is measured in terms of the state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group.