Xcast6 Treemap Islands - A Mixed Model of Application and Network Layer Multicast

摘要

IP multicast is a protocol that deals with group communications with the aim of reducing traffic redundancy in the network. However, due to difficulty in deployment and poor scalability with a large number of multicast groups, IP multicast is still not widely deployed and used on the Internet. Recently, Xcast6 and Xcast6 Treemap, the two network layer multicast protocols, have been proposed with complementary scaling properties to IP multicast: they support a very large number of active multicast sessions. However, the key limitation of these protocols is that they only support small multicast group. In this paper, we propose Xcast6 Treemap island - a hybrid model of Application Layer Multicast (ALM) and Xcast6 that can work for large multicast group. Our model has several key advantages: ease of deployment, efficiency in bandwidth savings, no control message between end-host and router, zero multicast forwarding state at router and no need for a multicast address allocation protocol. In addition, this model is a potential service from which an ISP can get new revenue. Finally, in simulation section, we have made a comparison with IP multicast and NICE protocol to show the feasibility of our new model.