A hybrid multicast communication system for Internet video broadcasting

A combination of multicast datagram transfer protocol (MDTP) and overlay multicast system for video broadcasting service over the Internet is proposed. Both are protocols for multicast communication system, which is required to deliver video broadcasting service because the conventional unicast system may waste the network resources. This hybrid system is designed to overcome the issues in MDTP on stream redundancy and processing delay at MDTP edge router. These issues are caused by the mechanism in MDTP, which makes the edge router to send individual copy of video stream to each client. To solve these problems, overlay multicast is employed at the edge of the network. The role of the overlay multicast algorithm is in delegating the multicast functions from edge router to the clients. A simulation result shows that the hybrid multicast system yields an improvement on the average network bandwidth usage over the system which uses only MDTP or overlay multicast.