Deployment issues for the IP multicast service and architecture

Abstract

IP multicast offers scalable point-to-multipoint delivery necessary for using group communication applications on the Internet. However, the IP multicast service has seen slow commercial deployment by ISPs and carriers. The original service model was designed without a clear understanding of commercial requirements or a robust implementation strategy. The very limited number of applications and the complexity of the architectural design-which we believe is a consequence of the open service model-have deterred widespread deployment as well. We examine the issues that have limited the commercial deployment of IP-multicast from the viewpoint of carriers. We analyze where the model fails, what it does not offer, and we discuss requirements for successful deployment of multicast services.

Towards an error control scheme for a publish/subscribe network

“…Even though IP multicast was not widely deployed [1], considerable work was dedicated to multicast transport layer protocols. The culmination of these efforts is Pragmatic General Multicast (PGM) [9], a reliable multicast transport protocol that guarantees that a receiver in the multicast group will either receive all data packets (from their original transmission or a retransmission), or will detect unrecoverable data packet losses.…”

“…the distribution of data from a single source to a group of receivers via a multicast tree, whereby each packet crosses each tree link only once. Unfortunately, IP multicast turned out to be hard to deploy, for both technical and business reasons [1].…”

Multicast in 3G networks:

“…Our work presented in [43] and [45] known, eases the mechanisms for security and the mechanisms for source and receiver charging. The MBMS architecture addresses to some extent the multicast deployment problem issues raised in [28].…”

Characterization of signaling and traffic in Joost

“…An example of tree-based streaming application is Peercast [12], an open-source software for streaming both audio and video. A peculiarity of Peercast is that any node can specify the maximum number of incoming connections allowed.…”