MNet - a new multicast approach for the future Internet

Multicast communication in the Internet has deserved increasing attention in the last few years. Nowadays, there are more and more applications that require communication systems with multipoint communication capabilities. Multicast communication reduces both the time it takes to send data to a large set of receivers and the amount of network resources required to deliver such data. This is why Internet service providers (ISPs) have a strong need for multicast solutions from vendors of networking products. The question now is how long it will be before multicast becomes a true Internet service. The paper presents a new multicast proposal, the MNet project, that is being developed at Laboratory of Communication and Telematics of the Informatics Engineering Department of the University of Coimbra, Portugal. The approach explores the use of multicast servers in conjunction with the SSM (source specific multicast) protocol, addressing some of the SSM limitations, of which the support of dynamic sources and the support of QoS heterogeneity are the most important. After presentation and discussion, evaluation results are analysed, showing that the proposed model is beneficial when compared with the original SSM solution.