A monitoring framework for hybrid multicast networks

Many popular Internet applications like IPTV, video or voice chat, social networks and massive multiplayer online games communicate in groups. While IP layer multicast remains hesitant in global deployment, applications implement their own group distribution techniques at the price of higher complexity and lower efficiency. Emerging hybrid multicast approaches become a promising alternative to fill that gap. Hybrid multicast networks bridge between application and IP-layer multicast and gain multicast deployment at a system level throughout the Internet. In this paper, we present a monitoring framework for such hybrid multicast networks based on a common API in the process of standardization. Monitoring tools are useful to identify network failures and to improve the performance. The target of our monitoring framework is to collect, analyze and visualize node and routing information, thereby making the complexity of hybrid networks accessible to network administrators for the first time.