Multicast session announcements on top of SSM

Before having a multicast event, information about the event needs to be announced to prospective participants. In the current multicast service model, called any source multicast (ASM), it is achieved by exchanging this information on a well-known multicast group address. Researchers have developed SSM, as an alternative multicast model in response to problems with ASM. And therefore, the expectation is that SSM will soon replace ASM in the interdomain scale. Session announcements is inherently a many-to-many application. Support for this application on top of SSM is not a straight forward task. But, success of large scale multicast content distribution partly depends on the existence of a successful session announcements mechanism. In this paper we propose a mechanism to support multicast session announcements application on top of SSM.