On Naming , Addressing , and Programming in Multicast ∗

I. INTRODUCTION Emerging popular applications like IPTV and MMORGs urge the need for multicast. However, there is no global multicast deployment available today. At the same time many traditional and mobile systems would largely benefit from ease and efficiency of a network group service. A uniformly available multicast service will offer the chance to replace proprietary workarounds deployed in manifold ways. Developers of applications for group communication need to decide on using IP or overlay multicast, multipoint unicast, or a reflecting server at the time of coding. In contrast, they may implement dynamic handling of different multicast technologies with respect to possible multicast deployment states, which increases complexity. In fact, application developers want to create group applications that run, without considering the specific multicast service below. The concepts of naming and addressing must be considered to abstract the identification of applications from data distribution paths. Mul-ticast names are necessary to leverage technology–agnostic multicast programming. They can be used in a common group communication API, which has recently been defined in [1]. In this paper, we analyze the challenges of naming and addressing in global, heterogeneous multicast communication. Section II presents the problem space followed by Section III, which introduces a novel naming scheme. Finally, Section IV gives a conclusion and outlook.