Multicast transport protocols: a survey and taxonomy

Network support for multicast has triggered the development of group communication applications such as multipoint data dissemination and multiparty conferencing tools. To support these applications, several multicast transport protocols have been proposed and implemented. Multicast transport protocols have been an area of active research for the past couple of years. This article summarizes the activities in this work-in-progress area by surveying several multicast transport protocols. It also presents a taxonomy to classify the surveyed protocols according to several distinct features, discusses the rationale behind the protocol´s design decisions, and presents some current research-issues in multicast protocol design