IP Multicast Operational Network Management: Design, Challenges and Experiences

There has been tremendous growth in popularity of multiple receiver applications like media streaming and data distribution services. The Internet is being increasingly used as a transport for carrying high bandwidth media streams of training and education classes, broadcast events, etc. Webcasts like “Victoria’s Secret Event” and “NetAid Event” might have been much better realized with IP multicast. Multicast not only reduces the network traffic, it also reduces the server load. Despite the increased need for IP multicast, its commercial deployment has been very limited and slow. Multicast [1] has been around for over a decade but has not seen any significant deployment in ISP and enterprise networks. Diot et al. [6] discuss various deployment issues for the IP multicast service and note the lack of management support as one of the primary inhibitors.