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In this paper, we present a new multicast architecture and the corresponding multicast routing protocol for providing efficient and flexible multicast services over the Internet. Traditional multicast protocols construct and update the multicast tree in a distributed manner, which may cause two problems: first, since each node has only local or partial information on the network topology and group membership, it is difficult to build an efficient multicast tree and, second, due to the lack of complete information, broadcast is often used for sending control packets and data packets, which consumes a great deal of network bandwidth. In the newly proposed multicast architecture, a few powerful routers, called m-routers, collect multicast-related information and process multicast requests based on the information collected. The m-routers handle most of the multicast-related tasks, whereas other routers in the network only need to perform minimum functions for routing. The m-routers are designed to be able to handle simultaneous many-to-many communications efficiently. The new multicast routing protocol, called the Service-Centric Multicast Protocol (SCMP), builds a shared multicast tree rooted at the m-router for each group. The multicast tree is computed in the m-router by employing the Delay-Constrained Dynamic Multicast (DCDM) algorithm, which dynamically builds a delay-constrained multicast tree and minimizes the tree cost as well. The physical construction of the multicast tree over the Internet is performed by a special type of self-routing packets in order to minimize the protocol overhead. Our simulation results on ns-2 demonstrate that the new SCMP protocol outperforms other existing protocols and is a promising alternative for providing efficient and flexible multicast services over the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]