MRMA: A Multicast Resource Management Architecture for IP Platforms

Multicast with QoS guarantees is a bandwidth-efficient transmission scheme for the delivery of multi-user multimedia applications. Unlike most other related work, which focuses primarily on the algorithmic or protocol aspects of the multicast problem, our work focuses on the architecture and implementation aspects. In this paper, we present MRMA, a multicast resource management architecture designed to provision multicast with QoS guarantees over the IP platform. MRMA offers a flexible framework for integrating the necessary components for implementing the key multicast functions that are needed for creating, maintaining and terminating multicast sessions: QoSsensitive route selection and tree construction, address allocation, and session advertisement. Taking into account network operations that are unique to multicast-with-QoS, MRMA implements a hierarchical architecture that features centralized monitoring of network state and semi-distributed persession multicast management. The architecture also implements the idea of moving the heavy computational load of administering multicast operations outside the network and onto the hosts.