A Novel Approach for Transparent Bandwidth Conservation

Abstract

Abstract-As broadband Internet access becomes more widespread, demand for rich multimedia content will increase significantly. When this trend is coupled with the point-to-point nature of the Internet, it is only natural that there will be an increase in redundant network traffic. Hence, a wide variety of techniques have been developed to eliminate redundant traffic in the network ranging from multicast to caching. Multicast techniques suffer from deployment issues, while caching techniques offer limited benefit for data with close temporal proximity (i.e. streaming).In this paper, we present a novel approach, stealth multicast, which offers a practical solution for the adoption of network-level IP multicast. Rather than focusing on a global scale such as with previous approaches, stealth multicast optimizes efficiency on a domain-wise scale. In short, stealth multicast dynamically combines redundant data payloads into virtual groups for multicast transmission across the domain. At the edge of the domain, the packets are converted back to unicast, thus keeping stealth multicast true to its namesake in that neither the user applications nor the external domain are aware of the presence of multicast.The features of stealth multicast allow it to be deployed without requiring changes to the server, client, or external Internet. Furthermore, QoS impact is strictly limited due to controls and the fact that only packets that are known to be likely amenable to multicasting are queued. Finally, stealth multicast allows the economic benefit of multicast to be directable, giving ISPs an incentive to deploy multicast.

An Improved Channel Access Model for IEEE 802.11 WLANs

“…The wireless stealth multicast technique: In this technique, a minor amount of packet delay is used to detect and eliminate redundancy in the network. This technique represents an extension of the work done in [3], and adopts stealth multicast to the wireless domain. Redundancy in the wireless network is detected at the base station and condensed into a broadcast for transmission across the wireless domain.…”