IP多播技术探讨

文章从组播的产生和发展出发,介绍了组播网络的体系结构和协议,讨论了组播技术的应用,总结了组播技术的难点。随着高宽带多媒体应用的迫切需求、因特网服务提供商(ISP)和因特网内容提供商(ICP)对IP组播网络的支持、设备提供商的投入、各种专业组织的介入,IP组播技术必然有着广阔的发展前景。     

Multicast Support in DiffServ Using Mobile Agents

Many multicast applications, such as video‐on‐demand and video conferencing, desire quality of service (QoS) support from an underlying network. The differentiated services (DiffServ) approach will bring benefits for theses applications. However, difficulties arise while integrating native IP multicasting with DiffServ, such as multicast group states in the core routers and a heterogeneous QoS requirement within the same multicast group. In addition, a missing per‐flow reservation in DiffServ and a dynamic join/leave in the group introduce heavier and uncontrollable traffic in a network. In this paper, we propose a distributed and stateless admission control in the edge routers. We also use a mobile agents‐based approach for dynamic resource availability checking. In this approach, mobile agents act in a parallel and distributed fashion and cooperate with each other in order to construct the multicast tree satisfying the QoS requirements.     

Deployment issues for the IP multicast service and architecture

IP multicast offers the scalable point-to-multipoint delivery necessary for using group communication applications on the Internet. However, the IP multicast service has seen slow commercial deployment by ISPs and carriers. The original service model was designed without a clear understanding of commercial requirements or a robust implementation strategy. The very limited number of applications and the complexity of the architectural design-which we believe is a consequence of the open service model-have deterred widespread deployment as well. We examine the issues that have limited the commercial deployment of IP multicast from the viewpoint of carriers. We analyze where the model fails and what it does not offer, and we discuss requirements for successful deployment of multicast services     

Performance evaluation of the MoM mobile multicast protocol

This paper presents a performance study of a mobile multicast protocol called MoM, which is designed to support IP multicast for mobile hosts in an IP internetwork. The protocol uses the basic unicast routing capability of IETF Mobile IP, and leverages existing IP multicast to provide multicast services for mobile hosts as well. A key feature of the MoM protocol is the use of designated multicast service providers (DMSPs) to improve the scalability of mobile multicast. Discrete-event simulation is used in the performance evaluation of the protocol. The performance study focuses on the scalability, routing efficiency, fairness, and overhead of the MoM protocol, as well as on DMSP selection policies and the deliverability of multicast messages. The simulation results suggest distinct performance advantages for the MoM protocol over other approaches for mobile multicast, such as bi-directional tunnelling, particularly as the number of mobile group members increases. Furthermore, even simple policies for choosing a DMSP from possible candidates provide reasonable tradeoffs between handoff rates, routing efficiency, deliverability of messages, and protocol overhead. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Multicast group behavior in the Internet's multicast backbone(MBone)

The multicast backbone (MBone) is a network overlaying the global Internet and designed to support multipoint applications. The authors first give an overview of the development and architecture of the current MBone. One important characteristic of the MBone is its reliance on IP multicast which allows receivers to join and leave groups asynchronously. The authors describe the Mlisten data collection tool that was created to provide a mechanism for capturing information about when members join and leave a multicast group. Using data collected with Mlisten, the authors present statistics about some of the MBone sessions they monitored. Results are provided for key parameters including multicast participant interarrival times and participant durations, multicast tree size and characteristics, and intersession relationships. Collecting data about MBone usage can improve our understanding of how multicast communication and real-time protocols are being used today     

Low‐loss TCP/IP header compression for wireless networks

Wireless is becoming a popular way to connect mobile computers to the Internet and other networks. The bandwidth of wireless links will probably always be limited due to properties of the physical medium and regulatory limits on the use of frequencies for radio communication. Therefore, it is necessary for network protocols to utilize the available bandwidth efficiently. Headers of IP packets are growing and the bandwidth required for transmitting headers is increasing. With the coming of IPv6 the address size increases from 4 to 16 bytes and the basic IP header increases from 20 to 40 bytes. Moreover, most mobility schemes tunnel packets addressed to mobile hosts by adding an extra IP header or extra routing information, typically increasing the size of TCP/IPv4 headers to 60 bytes and TCP/IPv6 headers to 100 bytes. In this paper, we provide new header compression schemes for UDP/IP and TCP/IP protocols. We show how to reduce the size of UDP/IP headers by an order of magnitude, down to four to five bytes. Our method works over simplex links, lossy links, multi‐access links, and supports multicast communication. We also show how to generalize the most commonly used method for header compression for TCP/IPv4, developed by Jacobson, to IPv6 and multiple IP headers. The resulting scheme unfortunately reduces TCP throughput over lossy links due to unfavorable interaction with TCP's congestion control mechanisms. However, by adding two simple mechanisms the potential gain from header compression can be realized over lossy wireless networks as well as point‐to‐point modem links. This revised version was published online in June 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Multicast-Kommunikation im Internet

The Internet supports group communications by its multicast concept. Several Internet protocol extensions and new protocols have been developed in order to realize multicast in the Internet. This paper focuses on the IP multicast architecture, in particular on the IP multicast extensions and the corresponding multicast routing protocols. The IP multicast model has significant impacts on the underlying network technologies and on the transport protocols and applications on top of IP. These impacts are also discussed in the paper.     

基于IP网络的多点视频会议系统的设计与实现

本文设计实现了一套基于IP网络的多点视频会议系统.系统采用了集中与分布式多点控制单元(MCU)相结合的设计,使得MCU和每个终端都具有召开多方会议的多点控制器功能.系统同时支持多组的多点会议,会议人员通过IP多播网互连,实现实时的多媒体数据通信.     

雷达组网中的IP实时可靠多播

随着Internet的发展,要求一对多或多对多通信形式的网络应用迅速增长,IP多播服务为该类网络应用提供了一种有效的通信手段。但是基于IP的多播是一种无连接的数据传输方式(UDP),UDP数据传输是一种“尽力而为”的方式,因此在传输过程中存在丢包和乱序现象。对于某些应用,该传输的不可靠性是不允许的,因此出现了可靠多播技术。可靠多播协议的应用针对性很强,不同的应用场合对可靠多播的要求以及实现方法也大不相同。文中分析了雷达组网对多播及其实时性和可靠性的需求,参考现有的解决可靠多播主要问题的方法,初步提出了一种适合于小批量数据分发的实时可靠多播通信协议的设计方案。     

Source Filtering in IP Multicast Routing

IP multicasting is an efficient group communication mechanism. It avoids transmitting packets from a sender to each of the receivers separately. Under the current IP multicast model, once having joined a group, the host will receive all data destined to the group from any source, irrespective of whether it wishes to receive them. This paper studies source filtering (SF) in IP multicasting. Source filtering allows individual hosts to specify the reception of packets sent to a multicast group only from a list of source addresses or to explicitly identify a list of the sources whose data the hosts do not want to receive. We investigate the issue of source filtering in the context of multicast routing protocols, and provide support of source filtering for shared-tree based IP multicast routing. We also discuss how source filtering improves the performance of existing work on IP multicast. Finally, we provide analysis and conduct simulations to evaluate the performance of the proposed SF mechanism. The results show that our mechanism allows better bandwidth utilization and scalability than those without the capability of source filtering, thus achieving a truly efficient use of resources for IP multicasting     

TMSP: Terminal Mobility Support Protocol

Mobile IP enables IP mobility support for mobile node (MN), but it suffers from triangular routing, packet redirecting, increase in IP header size, and the need for new infrastructure support. This paper details an alternative to enable terminal mobility support for MN. This scheme does not suffer from triangular routing effect and does not require dedicated infrastructure support such as home agent. It also does not increase the size of the IP header and does not require redirection of packets. These benefits are enabled with a tradeoff, which requires modifications on MN and its correspondent node. It uses an innovative IP-to-IP address mapping method to provide IP address transparency for applications and taps on the pervasiveness of SIP as a location service. From our analysis, we show that TMSP is much more efficient than mobile IP in terms of the number of hops as well as overhead. Our prototype implementation also shows that TMSP provides seamless communication for both TCP and UDP connections and the computational overhead for TMSP has minimal impact on packet transmission.     

A survey of proposals for an alternative group communication service

As expectations for the Internet to support multimedia applications grow, new services need to be deployed. One of them is the group communication service for one-to-many or many-to-many data delivery. After more than a decade of important research and development efforts, the deployment of multicast routing in the Internet is far behind expectations. Therefore, a first motivation for an alternative group communication service is to bypass the lack of native IP multicast routing. Although less efficient and scalable than native multicast routing, such alternative services are generally suitable for the purpose. A second possible motivation is to go beyond the limitations of classic multicast routing for very specific working environments. We identify, classify, and discuss some of these alternative approaches.     

A survey of congestion control schemes for multicast video applications

Congestion control for IP multicast on the Internet has been one of the main issues that challenge a rapid deployment of IP multicast. In this article, we survey and discuss the most important congestion control schemes for multicast video applications on the Internet. We start with a discussion of the different elements of a multicast congestion control architecture. A congestion control scheme for multicast video possesses specific requirements for these elements. These requirements are discussed, along with the evaluation criteria for the performance of multicast video. We categorize the schemes we present into end-to-end schemes and router-supported schemes. We start with the end-to-end category and discuss several examples of both single-rate multicast applications and layered multicast applications. For the router-supported category, we first present single-rate schemes that utilize filtering of multicast packets by the routers. Next we discuss receiver-based layered schemes that rely on routers group?flow control of multicast sessions. We evaluate a number of schemes that belong to each of the two categories.     

Mobile and Multicast IP Services in PACS: System Architecture, Prototype, and Performance

Traditionally, wireless cellular communication systems have been engineered for voice. With the explosive growth of Internet applications and users, there is an increasing demand on providing Internet services to mobile users based on the voice-oriented cellular networks. However, Internet services add a set of radically different requirements on to the cellular wireless networks, because the nature of communication is very different from voice. It is a challenge to develop an adequate network architecture and necessary systems components to meet those requirements.This paper describes our experience on developing Internet services, in particular, mobile and multicast IP services, in PACS (Personal Access Communication Systems). Our major contributions are five-fold: (i) PACS system architecture that provides wireless Internet and Intranet access by augmenting the voice network with IP routers and backbone links to connect to the Internet; (ii) simplified design of RPCU (Radio Port Controller Unit) for easy service maintenance and migration to future IP standards such as IPv6; (iii) native PACS multicast to efficiently support dynamic IP multicast and MBone connectivity; (iv) optimization and incorporation of Mobile IP into PACS handoff mechanism to efficiently support roaming within a PACS network as well as global mobility between PACS networks and the Internet; (v) successful prototype design of the new architecture and services verified by extensive performance measurements of IP applications. Our design experience and measurement results demonstrate that it is highly feasible to seamlessly integrate the PACS networks into the Internet with global IP mobility and IP multicast services.     

Unicast and multicast IP error performance over an ATM satellitelink

IP multicast using ATM-based satellites provides the potential to support multimedia applications, including audio/video streaming and information distribution, at a large scale. This article considers the impact of satellite channel errors, and equations are derived for the probability of IP datagram loss in the presence of burst errors on the satellite link. When there are a large number of multicast receivers per spotbeam there is a significant probability that one or more recipients will not receive the data, and this has implications particularly for the design of reliable multicast network protocols     

Stateless overlay multicast with in-packet bloom filters

Due to the difficulty of deploying Internet protocol (IP) multicast on the Internet on a large scale, overlay multicast has been considered as a promising alternative to develop the multicast communication in recent years. However, the existing overlay multicast solutions suffer from high costs to maintain the state information of nodes in the multicast forwarding tree. A stateless overlay multicast scheme is proposed, in which the multicast routing information is encoded by a bloom filter (BF) and encapsulated into the packet header without any need for maintaining the multicast forwarding tree. Our scheme leverages the node heterogeneity and proximity information in the physical topology and hierarchically constructs the transit-stub overlay topology by assigning geometric coordinates to all overlay nodes. More importantly, the scheme uses BF technology to identify the nodes and links of the multicast forwarding tree, which improves the forwarding efficiency and decreases the false-positive forwarding loop. The analytical and simulation results show that the proposal can achieve high forwarding efficiency and good scalability.     

IP多播技术综述

随着Internet的广泛使用,多媒体业务等在网络中的增加,IP多播技术成为学术界、网路设备制造商、服务供应商等关注的热点,对未来网络进一步发展有重要意义。介绍IP多播技术的发展,讨论IP多播技术以及其体系结构,叙述几种常见的IP多播路由协议以及新发展,并分析了其应用。     

Multicast forwarding over ATM: Native approaches

Multicasting is growing in importance as new multimedia applications are devised. Throughout this article, multicasting is understood as the efficient multipoint-to-multipoint transmission of information (in terms of network resource consumption) between the members of a group. Most multicast services have been designed up to now to work over connectionless environments. The approach adopted by connection-oriented networks has been to try to imitate these connectionless multicast schemes with the aim of supporting IP multicast or network-layer broadcast. However, these solutions present drawbacks in terms of delay or signaling overhead. The goal of native ATM multicasting is to provide multicast communications support by taking into account the characteristics of ATM. Therefore, the design philosophy of multicast must be rethought by making it more suitable for connection-oriented networks. Native ATM multicasting is based on mechanisms implemented at the switches to allow the correct ATM-layer multicast forwarding of information. These mechanisms seek to avoid the delay and signaling problems of current solutions, e.g., LAN emulation and IP multicast over ATM. This article provides a survey of the literature on the strategies that offer multicast communications in ATM environments, with special stress on native ATM multicast forwarding mechanisms. Other aspects, such as signaling, quality of service, traffic control, and routing, are not addressed in detail in this article.     

Investigation of multicast‐based mobility support in all‐IP cellular networks

To solve the IP mobility problem, the use of multicast has been proposed in a number of different approaches, applying multicast in different characteristic ways. We provide a systematic discussion of fundamental options for multicast‐based mobility support and the definition and experimental performance evaluation of selected schemes. The discussion is based on an analysis of the architectural, performance‐related, and functional requirements. By using these requirements and selecting options regarding network architecture and multicast protocols, we identify promising combinations and derive four case studies for multicast‐based mobility in IP‐based cellular networks. These case studies include both the standard any‐source IP multicast model as well as non‐standard multicast models, which optimally utilize the underlying multicast. We describe network architecture and protocols as well as a flexible software environment that allows to easily implement these and other classes of mobility‐supporting multicast protocols. Multicast schemes enable a high degree of flexibility for mobility mechanisms in order to meet the service quality required by the applications with minimal protocol overhead. We evaluate this overhead using our software environment by implementing prototypes and quantifying handoff‐specific metrics, namely, handoff and paging latency, packet loss and duplication rates, as well as TCP goodput. The measurement results show that these multicast‐based schemes improve handoff performance for high mobility in comparison to the reference cases: basic and hierarchical Mobile IP. Comparing the multicast‐schemes among each other the performance for the evaluated metrics is very similar. As a result of the conceptual framework classification and our performance evaluations, we justify specific protocol mechanisms that utilize specific features of the multicast. Based on this justification, we advocate the usage of a source‐specific multicast service model for multicast‐based mobility support that adverts the weaknesses of the classical Internet any‐source multicast service model. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.