Multicast Session Directory Architecture: A PhD Proposal

IP Multicast holds great promise for the Internet in the near future. With the explosion in the multimedia content providers, very soon current Internet infrastructure will begin to feel the pressure due to higher bandwidth demands that may limit the content provider subscriber base and / or limit the quality of the stream. Multicast is best suited to address such concerns of scale and efficient network bandwidth utilization. One of the limiting factors that have stopped widespread Multicast deployment is the lack of global session's directory structure. Ubiquitous URLs along with the DNS infrastructure which has been a major factor for fast and increasing popularity of the Internet and the lack thereof for the Multicast points towards one of the last stumbling blocks for its widespread deployment. • Proposal for a global and scalable Multicast session directory architecture • Design of user friendly URLs for various Multicast Streams • Efficient Multicast address allocation infrastructure • Possible elimination of Globally Scoped Multicast addresses collision among sessions in various administrative domains 0.1.3 Research Motivation IGMP v3 which is still in draft stage promises to simplify the Multicast protocol complexity significantly. It gives up on traditional ASM (Any Source Multicast) model in favor of simpler SSM (Single Source Multicast) model. This new model greatly simplifies the network complexity by removing the source discovery responsibility from the routers but places them on the end hosts. It would be highly desirable and convenient if end users can query for Multicast sources in real time. Although IPv6 solves IP Address scarcity issue but it still remains years away from full deployment. Multicast address in IPv4 traditionally defined as class D address is a scarce resource strictly managed by IANA based on IETF guidelines. Therefore efficient Multicast addresses distribution and reuse is highly desirable. Proper URL scheme in order to map correctly to the Multicast resource should greatly improve the usability of the technology therefore could result in faster and wider acceptance and deployment in the consumer networks. Address collisions among different multicast sessions may lead to significantly added burden on the end hosts' IP stack in order to filter out the garbage stream data. Therefore for efficient network resource and CPU cycle utilization it becomes extremely important to minimize address collisions.