Integrated many-to-many multicast addressing and access control method

IP multicast is an efficient method for distributing multimedia content to a large number of receivers while saving the network bandwidth and reducing processing overhead on the source side. However, current IP multicast deployment figure is still far away behind the expectations of both internet service and content providers due to several deployment complexities. In particular, multicast routers cannot trigger automatically a unidirectional or a bidirectional multicast routing protocol unless they are manually configured to use a specific routing protocol for a predetermined pool of IP multicast addresses. To limit flooding multicast content, each multicast group is identified by a specific scope. With such scope, the access control rights of senders and receivers access are not properly defined. To ease multicast router dynamic auto-configuration and access control check, we propose a new integrated multicast addressing and access control method. In our new method, we define a new expanded scope filed for IPv6, which enables a plurality of hierarchical distribution scopes to be embedded simultaneously within the multicast address. In addition, in the new scope format, the access rights are encoded for each distribution scope with respect to sending and receiving permissions.