Multicast Routing Debugger (MRD) - A System to Monitor the Status of Multicast Network

IP Multicast can efficiently provide enormous bandwidth savings by enabling sources to send a single copy of a message to multiple recipients who explicitly want to receive the information. But due to the complexity of IP multicast and its fundamental differences from unicast, there are not very many tools available for monitoring and debugging multicast networks, and only a few experts understand the tools that do exist. This paper proposes a Multicast Routing Debugger (MRD) system that monitors the status of a multicast network. This system is aimed to multicast-related faults detection. In this paper, first, we define the set of information that should be monitored. Second, the method is developed to take out such information from multicast routers. Third, MRD system is prototyped to collect, process information from heterogeneous routers on a multicast network and to display the various status of the network comprehensively. The prototype of MRD system is implemented and deployed. We perform experiments with several scenarios. Experimental results show we can detect various problems as information that we define is monitored. The MRD system is simple to use, web-based and intuitive tool that can monitor the status of a specific multicast network. I. INTRODUCTION he exponential growth of the Internet combined with multimedia content is increasing the average size of the data transfers and pushing bandwidth constraints to their limits. IP Multicast efficiently can provide enormous bandwidth savings by enabling sources to send a single copy of a message to multiple recipients who explicitly want to receive the information. Unfortunately multicasting has been slow to catch on, except for the research-oriented Multicast Backbone [1], [2]. There are a variety of reasons for the difficulties in widespread multicast deployment [12]. One of largest current barriers is the difficulty in managing multicast traffic [13]. Due to the complexity of IP multicast and its fundamental differences from unicast, there are not many tools available to assist in monitoring the various status such as member-subnets,