Application Layer Multicast Protocols - 11/14/2002

Vikas Chauhan

IP has been the natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related functionality. However, ten years after its initial proposal, IP multicast is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scalability, network management, deployment and support for higher layer functionality such as error, flow and congestion control. We explore an alternative architecture for small and sparse groups, where end systems implement all multicast related functionality including membership management and packet replication. Such a scheme is called End System Multicast. This shifting of multicast support from routers to end systems has the potential to address most problems associated with IP Multicast.Two application level multicast protocols, Narada and NICE, with reasonable detail will be described in the talk. This is based on the work done by Banerjee et al(http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/16300724,536364,1,0.25,Download/http://citesee r.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/26404/http:zSzzSzwww.cs.umd.eduzSzLibraryzSzTRs zSzCS-TR-4373zSzCS-TR-4373.pdf/banerjee02scalable.pdf ) and by Chu et al (http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/rd/95915730,295897,1,0.25,Download/http://citese er.nj.nec.com/cache/papers/cs/14147/http:zSzzSzwww.cs.cmu.eduzSz~sanjayzSzPa perszSzsigmetrics-2000.pdf/chu00case.pdf)