Clique: a toolkit for group communication using IP multicast

In the network level computer group-communication (one-to-many) technology, IP-multicast contributes significant roles in enhancing the physical network scalability by replicating identical packets at routers. However, since its initial proposal the IP-multicast has not been widely enabled due to the slow pace of its deployment. Hence, the application-level multicast (ALM) concept emerged to solve this deployment issue by shifting the multicast support from routers to end-systems. The article reviews the most important facts of the Application-Level Multicast and its proposed models. Furthermore, the article describes a novel concept of modeling relative density of members called bunched mode and a proposed host-end multicast transport protocol called shortest tunnel first (STF). The bunched mode is based on the thematic multicast concept (TMC), which means that it is a typical multicast scenario where there are a lot of interested hosts in certain institutes and these institutes are relatively far from each other. The developed analysis tool NetSim and the implementation of the TMC called PardedeCAST are also presented as the tools of this research.

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Scalable secure group communication over IP multicast

IEEE Journal on Selected Areas in Communications ◽

10.1109/jsac.2002.803986 ◽

2002 ◽

Vol 20 (8) ◽

pp. 1511-1527 ◽

Cited By ~ 51

Author(s):

S. Banerjee ◽

B. Bhattacharjee

Keyword(s):

Group Communication ◽

Ip Multicast ◽

Secure Group Communication

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Reliability Issues of the Multicast-Based Mediacommunication

Encyclopedia of Multimedia Technology and Networking, Second Edition ◽

10.4018/978-1-60566-014-1.ch165 ◽

2009 ◽

pp. 1215-1223

Author(s):

Gábor Hosszú

Keyword(s):

Multicast Routing ◽

Group Communication ◽

Multimedia Applications ◽

Point Of View ◽

Multicast Tree ◽

Ip Multicast ◽

Special Role ◽

Application Layer ◽

Emerging Media ◽

Multicast Routing Protocol

The multimedia applications generally support one-tomany group communication. Multicasting decreases the communication costs for applications, which send the same data to multiple receivers. Table 1 summarizes the types of the communication among the hosts. Currently, there is an increasing need for scalable and efficient group communication. Theoretically, multicasting is optimal for such purposes. Therefore, this technology is an emerging media dissemination technology, instead of the traditional unicast communication. It has two important types: the networklevel, namely IP-multicast, and the Application-Layer, host-multicast. In the former one, the data packets are delivered by the IP protocol, from one host to many hosts that are member of a multicast group. The routers run an IP-multicast routing protocol in order to construct a multicast tree. Along this tree, the data is forwarded to each host. Special IP addresses (224.0.0.0 - 239.255.255.255 address range) are used, which do not belong to hosts, but rather define multicast channels. In the case of Application-Layer Multicast (ALM), the hosts use unicast IP delivery, and the routers do not play any special role. Reliability is one of the most important features of all multimedia applications, independently from the multicast technology in use. This requirement is especially critical in the case of multicast, where the large volume of data is to be transferred, and correction or resending of lost data is even more difficult in time. In the multicast technology, the maintenance of the group membership information is also an important question from the point of view of the robustness of the so-called multicast delivery tree. The root of the tree is the sender, the leaves are the receivers, and the intermediate nodes are the routers in case of the IP-multicast. In the following sections, the reliability properties of different multicast technologies are overviewed.

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Mediacommunication Based on Application-Layer Multi-cast

Encyclopedia of Virtual Communities and Technologies ◽

10.4018/978-1-59140-563-4.ch057 ◽

2011 ◽

pp. 302-307 ◽

Cited By ~ 1

Author(s):

Gábor Hosszú

Keyword(s):

Group Communication ◽

Video On Demand ◽

The Internet ◽

Ip Multicast ◽

Application Layer ◽

Multiple Copies ◽

Wide Scale ◽

Live Broadcast ◽

The One ◽

Scalable Methods

Collaborating and media-handling applications demand efficient and scalable methods for media streaming and group communication; however, such mechanisms have still not been deployed widely in the Internet. Network-level multicasting (in the Internet it is called IP-multicast) gives a bandwidth-saving solution for the one-to-many and many-to-many group communication, since it provides an efficient network mechanism through which senders can transmit their information to a large number of receivers without having to send multiple copies of the same data over a physical link (Hosszú, 2001). The IP-multicast has been realized for research purposes on multicast-capable networks (so-called multicast islands) within the Internet, but wide-scale deployment has not been reached due to some unresolved issues. That is why recent efforts are in the development of multicasting protocols at the application layer instead of the network layer. Most of these Application-Layer Multicast (ALM) protocols address the case of a single-source streaming media to a large number of receivers in applications such as video on demand or live broadcast. In the following sections, the main properties of the ALM protocols are overviewed, then some typical ALM solutions and a new approach are presented.

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