An Integrated Two-Tier Multicast-Agent Architecture for All-IP Multicast Transport Services

Abstract

Current group communication applications need to overcome inter-domain and heterogeneous multicast transport challenges. All-IP multicast over Internet is proposed to achieve the efficiency and transparency on IP multicast packet delivery not only for native IP multicast domains, but also for non-IP multicast supported domains. To guarantee the efficient IP multicast packet delivery over heterogeneous networks, therefore application level multicast (ALM) and overlay multicast (OM) were introduced for the connectivity of inter-domain coordination and local heterogeneous access. In this paper, we propose two-tier multicast agent (MA) mechanism to integrate ALM with overlay tunnel connections to inter-domain multicast and network level connections to local heterogeneous multicast access. In our experimental results, the proposed MA mechanism can achieve all-IP multicast transport services with multicast packet transmission over inter-domain and heterogeneous local wired/wireless access networks.

Performance optimization of media distribution in overlay networks using OpenFlow

“…Overlay multicast and application layer multicast construct virtual networks for multicast groups. Unlike IP multicast, they replicate data packets at end hosts (or agents) [6], which is approach similar to P2P. A set of distributed Multicast Service Agent (MSA) are allocated in networks, which communicate to terminal hosts using multicast approach and connect with server using standard unicast approach with tunneling.…”