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Well-known issues with multicast have prevented the deployment of multicast in 802.11 and other local-area wireless environments. This document offers guidance on known limitations and problems with wireless multicast. Also described are certain multicast enhancement features that have been specified by the IETF and by IEEE 802 for wireless media, as well as some operational choices that can be taken to improve the performace of the network. Finally, some recommendations are provided about the usage and combination of these features and operational choices.

This document specifies a network proxy that uses Multicast DNS to automatically populate the wide-area unicast Domain Name System namespace with records describing devices and services found on the local link.

Networking plays a crucial role in cloud computing especially in an inter-cloud environment, where data communications among data centers located at different geographical sites form the foundation of inter-cloud federation. Data transmissions required for inter-cloud federation in the complex inter-cloud networking system are often point-to-multi points, which calls for a more effective and efficient multicast routing algorithm in complex networking systems. In this paper, we investigate the multicast routing problem in the inter-cloud context with K constraints where K U+2265 2. Unlike most of existing algorithms that are too complex to be applied in practical scenarios, a novel and fast algorithm for establishing multicast routing tree for interclouds is proposed. The proposed algorithm leverages an entropybased process to aggregate all weights into a comprehensive metric, and then uses it to search a multicast tree U+0028 MT U+0029 on the basis of the shortest path tree U+0028 SPT U+0029.We conduct complexity analysis and extensive simulations for the proposed algorithm from the approximation perspective. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that the algorithm is more efficient than a representative multi-constrained multicast routing algorithm in terms of both speed and accuracy, and thus we believe that the proposed algorithm is applicable to the inter-cloud environment.

Wireless mesh networks (WMNs) connect to the Internet via access gateways. This paper studies multi-source video multicast in Internet-connected WMNs. The focus is on the design of a shareable integrated multicast that allows the multicasts of video sources to employ common Internet shortcuts or WMN paths to avoid potentially high WMN overheads and excessive Internet usage. Several algorithms are described that together form a video multicast framework running a controlled number of shareable multicasts under the constraint of Internet availability. These algorithms are the resource-efficient source group algorithm, the efficient integrated architecture algorithm, and the interference-controlled multicasting tree algorithm. These algorithms represent different approaches to overcoming various costs arising from multi-source video multicast, enabling multiple video sources to distribute delay, and throughput-guaranteed videos to receivers across large-scale areas. Simulation results are presented that quantify the performance gains that can be achieved.

It is a quite common case for Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) in most application scenarios, that the same message needs to be sent to multiple destinations from a single sensor node. These applications can benefit from the use of multicast communications to conserve resource. Multicast geographic routing has recently been proposed as an efficient and scalable approach to fulfill this requirement by exploiting the location information of nodes instead of the global topology information to route multicast messages. As the sensor nodes are often powered by batteries and recharging them is infeasible, energy-efficient routing plays an important role towards the success of WSNs. In this paper, we address this challenging issue of WSNs and propose an energy-efficient multicast geographic routing protocol (EMGR) to achieve this goal. EMGR employs an energy-aware multicast tree, formed by the set of destinations and the source node based on the metric of energy over advance, to guide multicast message delivery and adaptively select the nodes closest to the energy-optimal relay location as the next forwarders for energy conservation. Analytic and simulation results demonstrate that our proposed protocol achieves the improved performance in terms of low energy consumption, control overhead, computational complexity, and high packet delivery ratio, compared to the existing protocols.

Multicast is designed to jointly deliver content from a single source to a set of destinations; hence, it can efficiently save the bandwidth consumption and reduce the load on the source. In many important applications, the appearance of multiple sources brings new opportunities and challenges to reduce the bandwidth consumption of a multicast transfer. In this paper, we focus on such type of multi-source multicast and construct an efficient routing forest with the minimum cost (MCF). MCF spans each destination by one and only one source, while minimizing the total cost (i.e. the weight sum of all links in one multicast routing) for delivering the same content from the source side to all destinations. Prior approaches for single source multicast do not exploit the opportunities of a collection of sources; hence, they remain inapplicable to the MCF problem. Actually, the MCF problem for a multi-source multicast is proved to be NP-hard. Therefore, we propose two ( 2 + ɛ ) -approximation methods, named P-MCF and E-MCF. We conduct experiments on our SDN testbed together with large-scale simulations under the random SDN network, regular SDN network and scale-free SDN network. All manifest that our MCF approach always occupies fewer network links and incurs less network cost for any multi-source multicast than the traditional Steiner minimum tree (SMT) of any related single source multicast, irrespective of the used network topology and the setting of multicast transfers.

Recently, the use of real-time multimedia applications has attracted the attention of mobile ad hoc network users. These applications support service quality. The characteristics of mobile ad hoc networks such as lack of central coordinator, mobility of hosts, dynamic changes in network topology and the limitation of access to resources have caused remarkable challenges in providing high quality services for mobile ad hoc networks. Bandwidth limitation of wireless nodes and the lack of adequate multicast trees are regarded as the main challenges for quality of service-based multicast routing. In this paper, an attempt was made to propose a more stable and more reliable in multi-path quality of service multicast routing protocol (SR-MQMR) for mobile ad-hoc networks. In the proposed method, considering the requested bandwidth, the researchers first used the signal strength of nodes to select the most stable nodes. Then, using the two parameters of route expiration time and the number of hops, we selected a route which had low delay and high stability. The results of simulations conducted in the present study indicated that the SR-MQMR protocol used less time slots than the MQMR protocol in the routing process which resulted in an increase in success ratio. Furthermore, the production of stable routes led to a significant enhancement of reliability. Since the reduction of route request packet exchange decreased overhead in the proposed method, the degree of consumed bandwidth decreased which led to an increase in network lifetime.

The multicast framework that provides a network with multicast group management and a multicast routing algorithm is universal and exclusive, which leads to two shortcomings to multicast communication. First, the multicast framework’s default multicast routing algorithm is not specially designed for congestion avoidance, which negatively affects the quality of service (QoS) of multicast trees. Second, customized multicast routing algorithms cannot be deployed over the framework. Therefore, the multicast framework cannot simultaneously satisfy the QoS requirements of different application scenarios. To overcome these two drawbacks, we propose an innovative multicast framework that can be deployed in parallel with the existing multicast framework as a multicast plug-in for an SDN network operating system. This promising feature makes it possible to use customized multicast routing algorithms and maintain compatibility with typical multicast applications. Furthermore, based on this multicast framework, we propose a delay-constrained multicast routing algorithm that borrows ideas from anycast to actively avoid traffic congestion in multicast trees. Experimental results show that the framework is feasible and performs well, especially in high-load situations.

Continuously enriched distributed systems in data centers generate much network traffic in push-style one-to-many group mode, raising new requirements for multicast transport in terms of efficiency and robustness. Existing reliable multicast solutions, which suffer from low robustness and inefficiency in either host-side protocols or multicast routing, are not suitable for data centers. In order to address the problems of inefficiency and low robustness, we present a sender-initiated, efficient, congestion-aware and robust reliable multicast solution mainly for small groups in SDN-based data centers, called MCTCP. The main idea behind MCTCP is to manage the multicast groups in a centralized manner, and reactively schedule multicast flows to active and low-utilized links, by extending TCP as the host-side protocol and managing multicast groups in the SDN-controller. The multicast spanning trees are calculated and adjusted according to the network status to perform a better allocation of resources. Our experiments show that, MCTCP can dynamically bypass the congested and failing links, achieving high efficiency and robustness. As a result, MCTCP outperforms the state-of-the-art reliable multicast schemes. Moreover, MCTCP improves the performance of data replication in HDFS (Hadoop Distributed File System) compared with the original and TCP-SMO (an alternative reliable multicast scheme) based ones, e.g., achieves up to 1.5 × and 1.1 × improvements in terms of throughput, respectively.

In-packet bloom filter based multicast is a family of techniques that have been recently proposed to address scalability issues in IP multicast. The main problem motivating these techniques is that network forwarding elements supporting traditional IP multicast store group specific forwarding state for every multicast tree traversing the element, resulting in poor memory scalability in networks with many active groups. Techniques in this family address this problem by encoding multicast routing information into in-packet bloom filters, which are memory efficient, probabilistic data structures for representing set membership. However, in existing approaches the probabilistic nature of bloom filters results in false-positive packet delivery, thereby introducing forwarding anomalies, unnecessary bandwidth utilization, and violations of security policies. In this work we contribute BloomFlow, a novel approach to bloom filter based multicast in SDN that achieves substantial forwarding state reduction while eliminating false positive packet delivery. The BloomFlow approach compensates for the stochastic uncertainty associated with bloom filters by incorporating the SDN network controller’s knowledge of the network topology and traffic workload into the generation of variable length and false-positive-free bloom filters. We further contribute a set of extensions to the OpenFlow protocol that demonstrates how our approach can be integrated into OpenFlow enabled networks with minimal modifications to switch hardware. We implement a working system prototype by extending the Stanford OpenFlow 1.0 Reference Switch and the POX SDN controller. We evaluate our approach through both flow level simulation, and packet level network emulation with Mininet and real media streams. We demonstrate that multicast forwarding using BloomFlow can achieve significant reductions in memory requirements due to network forwarding state (up to a ∼ 79% reduction in realistic WAN topologies under heavy multicast workloads). We find that this forwarding state reduction can be achieved with minimal bandwidth utilization overhead (averaging under ∼ 1%), and that our approach successfully meets time constraints required for deployment in a real-time SDN controller.

Motivated by high quality multimedia and remote collaborative environments, we solve the problem of multigroup multicast routing with a~number of features important for real-world deployment of the interactive media technologies. Based on the ant colony optimization metaheuristic, our algorithm is the first to work with uncertain knowledge of underlying network capabilities and support on-the-fly media transcoding inside the multicast tree. New contributions of this work are described next. We present two extensions of the algorithm, which improve quality of the solution. We introduce an~integrated approach to solution of the problem, which is effective for both original solving from scratch as well as for new dynamic reconfiguration of multicast tree, where minimum perturbation of existing solution is desired. Experiments show that our algorithm is not only successful in maintaining existing communication with low number of unnecessary disruptions, but also capable of keeping the multicast trees efficient.

The graphical abstract in the form of Pareto front solutions showing the trade-offs between the objectives is depicted in Fig. 1.Display Omitted Wireless networks have finite battery source, so QoS aware multicast routing must also be energy efficient.There is trade-off between energy consumption and QoS guarantees (i.e. end-to-end delay, delay jitter and packet loss) provided by a wireless network.These requirements are formulated as a multiobjective optimization problem.Ant based multiobjective algorithms are proposed to build an energy efficient multicast tree.Simulation results are compared with NSGA-III. Most of the group communication technologies support real-time multimedia applications such as video conferencing and distributed gaming. These applications require quality-of-service (QoS) aware multicast routing protocol to deliver the same data stream to a predefined group of receivers. Since nodes in wireless networks are severely energy constrained due to finite battery source, hence it is of paramount importance that QoS aware multicast routing protocol be energy efficient. Transmission power control is one of the methods used to save energy. In this method, the nodes dynamically adjust the transmission power so that energy consumption in the tree is minimized. However, reduction in the transmission power increases the number of forwarding nodes in the multicast tree. This negatively impacts the QoS in terms of propagation delay, delay jitter, and packet loss etc. In wireless networks, there is a trade-off between the energy consumption and the QoS guarantees provided by the network. We unify these requirements into a multiobjective framework referred to as Energy Efficient QoS Multicast Routing (E2QoSMR). The goal is to simultaneously optimize the total power consumption and the QoS parameters in the multicast tree. We extend two algorithms based on metaphor of swarm intelligence for finding an energy efficient multicast tree satisfying the QoS guarantees. Extensive simulations have been conducted to validate the correctness and efficiency of the algorithms. The simulation result of the algorithms is compared with the nondominated sorting genetic algorithm, NSGA-III. The experimental results are consolidated by statistical analyses that demonstrate the ability of the algorithms to generate the Pareto optimal solution set.

With the rapid evolution of multimedia and real-time applications like audio/video conferencing, certain quality-of-service (QoS) should be guaranteed for the multicast transmission. For the given delay-constrained multicast request, the goal of delay-constrained survivable multicast routing problem (DCSMRP) is to provide the primary multicast tree and protecting resources so that after recovering from the link (node)-failure, the recovered tree can satisfy the delay constraint. In this article, the DCSMRP with a single node-failure case on wavelength-division multiplexing (WDM) networks is considered. Three node-failure protecting methods, includes node-disjoint trees (NDT), node-encircling p-cycles (NEPCs) and failure-independent path protecting p-cycles (FIPP p-cycles) are used in this article. For each protecting method, an algorithm is designed to solve the studied problem. Simulations are also conducted to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithms.

With the growing trend of deploying Software defined networks (SDN) in Internet and data centers, it is necessary to investigate the operation of multicast services in this paradigm shift. We propose an OpenFlowbased virtualized platform to support multiple multicast services simultaneously, each with their own customized multicast algorithms and performance-enhancing strategies for its service requirements. The contributions include: 1) systematic discussions of the technical challenges re-garding to implementing multicast services in SDN, with the proposed architectural components addressing these issues; 2) a virtualized platform enabling user-defined multicast services, independent of current Internet-based protocols; 3) experiments validating the necessity and efficiency of the platform in supporting its design goals and functionalities, with two additional real multicast applications further confirming the feasibility and operability of the proposed prototype.

Internet applications such as web based monitoring; live internet video, online video, video conference, webcam viewing and internet video to TV are highly used in today’s IP communication. The trends of these applications are, that they are played on mobile devices and distributed to many end users. Multicast communication over IP contributes to the end users applications distribution. It has been discovered by a CISCO research that mobile multicast traffic will soon reach zetabyte in 2019. The aim of this paper is to introduce new method that enable multicast in network mobility management. The new method is using context transfer and multicast fast reroute technique. The proposed method is quantitatively evaluated in terms of packet loss and service recovery time

Today’s multiprocessor platforms employ the network-on-chip (NoC) architecture as the preferable communication backbone. Conventional NoCs are designed predominantly for unicast data exchanges. In such NoCs, the multicast traffic is generally handled by converting each multicast message to multiple unicast transmissions. Hence, applications dominated by multicast traffic experience high queuing latencies and significant performance penalties when running on systems designed with unicast-based NoC architectures. Various multicast mechanisms such as XY-tree multicast and path multicast have already been proposed to enhance the performance of the traditional wireline mesh NoC incorporating multicast traffic. However, even with such added features, the multihop nature of the wireline mesh NoC leads to high network latencies and thus limits the achievable system performance. In this paper, to sustain the high-bandwidth and high-throughput requirements of emerging applications, we propose the design of a wireless NoC (WiNoC) architecture incorporating necessary multicast support. By integrating congestion-aware multicast routing with network coding, the WiNoC is able to efficiently handle heavy multicast injections. For applications running with a broadcast-heavy Hammer cache coherence protocol, the proposed multicast-aware WiNoC achieves an average of 47% reduction in message latency compared with the XY-tree-based multicast-aware mesh NoC. This network level improvement translates into a 26% saving in full-system energy delay product.

In this paper, joint multicast routing and channel assignment problem in wireless mesh networks (WMNs) with hybrid traffic is investigated. Previous works design routing and channel assignment schemes for WMNs with single multicast session, however, resource usage is optimized for only one multicast session in this case and overall network load balance is left out of consideration. This may result in high congestion in some links, while others are underutilized. In this paper, multicast routing and channel assignment problem is solved from traffic management perspective by introducing load balance. Programming formulation is formulated to obtain the optimal results which can be used as benchmark to evaluate other schemes. Multicast weighted conflict graph is designed to model partially overlapped channels (POCs) interference in hybrid traffic scene. It regards links originating from the same node as one transmission to fully exploit wireless broadcast advantage; it uses link weight to measure interference degree and gives full consideration to interference characteristics of POCs. A heuristic multicast routing and channel assignment scheme based on multicast weighted conflict graph is designed to solve the joint problem, and simulation results show that the heuristic scheme can reduce network interference and improve WMNs service capability while dramatically reducing computational complexity.

Multicast routing that meets multiple quality of service constraints is important for supporting multimedia communications in the Internet of Things (IoT). Existing multicast routing technologies for IoT mainly focus on ad hoc sensor networking scenarios; thus, are not responsive and robust enough for supporting multimedia applications in an IoT environment. In order to tackle the challenging problem of multicast routing for multimedia communications in IoT, in this paper, we propose two algorithms for the establishing multicast routing tree for multimedia data transmissions. The proposed algorithms leverage an entropy-based process to aggregate all weights into a comprehensive metric, and then uses it to search a multicast tree on the basis of the spanning tree and shortest path tree algorithms. We conduct theoretical analysis and extensive simulations for evaluating the proposed algorithms. Both analytical and experimental results demonstrate that one of the proposed algorithms is more efficient than a representative multiconstrained multicast routing algorithm in terms of both speed and accuracy; thus, is able to support multimedia communications in an IoT environment. We believe that our results are able to provide in-depth insight into the multicast routing algorithm design for multimedia communications in IoT.

Multicast routing improves the efficiency of a network by effectively utilizing the available network bandwidth. In multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks the channel allocation strategy plays a vital role along with multicast tree construction. However, the multicast routing problem in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh networks is proven to be NP-hard. With this paper, we propose a Quality of Service Channel Assignment and multicast Routing (Q-CAR) algorithm. The proposed algorithm jointly solves the channel assignment and multicast tree construction problem by intelligent computational methods. We use a slightly modified differential evolution approach for assigning channels to links. We design a genetic algorithm based multicast tree construction strategy which determines a delay, jitter bounded low cost multicast tree. Moreover, we define a multi objective fitness function for the tree construction algorithm which optimizes interference as well as tree cost. Finally, we compare the performance of Q-CAR with QoS Multicast Routing and Channel Assignment(QoS-MRCA) and intelligent Quality of service multicast routing and Channel Assignment(i-QCA) algorithm in multichannel multiradio wireless mesh network (simulated) environments. Our experimental results distinctly show the outstanding performance of the proposed algorithm.

With Software Defined Networking (SDN), IP multicast becomes promising again. For IPTV applications over SDN, existing works would not scale well since they are based on per-source trees. As control-plane in SDN is logically centralized, constructing multiple shared trees is more feasible than that in traditional IP networks. Thus, in this work, we present a locality-aware multicast approach (LAMA) to construct multi-group shared trees in SDN, where each shared tree covers multiple multicast groups. In LAMA, the controller first clusters the multicast sources located in the vicinity into the same multicast cluster. For each multicast cluster, the controller selects the center switch which has the minimum distance to all multicast sources as its rendezvous point (RP) and then constructs a shortest-path multicast tree from the RP to its hosts. Finally, based on the multi-group shared trees, the controller can establish coarse-grained flow entries into on-tree switches to reduce the number of installed flow entries. Emulations on the Ryu controller and the Mininet emulator show that only 2-5 shared trees would suffice. The computation time in the controller using LAMA is around 70ms, much less than hundreds ms required for per-source trees. Moreover, LAMA only establishes 2300 flow entries, 4% of that with per-source trees in a large topology.

In many Internet of Things (IoT) applications, messages may need to be disseminated to some specific objects or nodes using multicast transmissions. In the literature, the multicast routing protocol can be divided into non-geographic-based and geographic-based. Since devices locations can be roughly derived by localization schemes or by GPS devices, geographic-based multicast routing protocols are preferred since they can induce less control packet overheads. However, we observe that existing geographic-based multicast routing schemes have the following two drawbacks. First, network nodes need a lot of computations to decide directions of sending multicast packets. Second, when a network has some holes or voids, the constructed multicast paths will be long, and in some cases, the paths may contain loops. In this work, we proposed a lightweight and distributed geographic multicast routing protocol to solve the above problems. Our scheme contains three phases. First, the first phase selects intermediate nodes to reach multicast destinations. Then, the second phase removes loops and trims routes constructed in the first phase. Finally, the last phase checks if the selected multicast links can further be merged. The simulation results indicate that the proposed scheme can effectively reduce transmission links and shorten path lengths in the constructed multicast paths. To demonstrate the proposed scheme can be applied to IoT applications, we also implement the designed scheme in ZigBee-compliant platforms. The experiment results show that the proposed scheme can also help to reduce multicast latency.

It is known that to support the applications such as datacenter backup and migration, multicast should be supported efficiently in inter-datacenter (inter-DC) networks to carry the corresponding point-to-multiple-point communications. Moreover, due to the traffic dynamics in inter-DC networks, we might have to consider the case that the multicast members can join or leave a multicast session dynamically. Therefore, in this work, we try to leverage control plane innovations to realize dynamic formulation of multicast sessions in inter-DC software-defined elastic optical networks (SD-EONs), which are equipped with multicast-incapable bandwidth-variable wavelength selective switches (MI-BV-WSS'). Here, one key issue to address is that the continuous changing of multicast group members can degrade the optimality of a multicast-tree. Hence, we propose to rearrange the multicast-trees adaptively to reduce their spectrum usage. Meanwhile, we try to minimize the frequency of rearrangements to avoid unnecessary operation complexity. Based on these considerations, we propose several multicast-tree rearrangement algorithms for updating multicast sessions dynamically with lightpath reroutings in inter-DC SD-EONs. Both partial and full multicast-tree rearrangements are studied. Simulation results indicate that the proposed algorithms can rearrange the multicast-trees intelligently such that the blocking probability can be reduced effectively with the least lightpath reroutings. Next, based on these theoretical investigations, we consider how to implement the proposed algorithms in the control plane of an inter-DC SD-EON. We extend the OpenFlow (OF) protocol to support the dynamic formulation of multicast sessions and also design the functional models in the control plane elements to realize multicast-tree rearrangements. Experiment results verify the effectiveness of our proposed algorithms and system design.

Nowadays, the transition of Wireless Sensor Networks (WSNs) to Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6), in particular to IPv6 over Low power Wireless Personal Area Networks (6LoWPAN), is evident [1] . However, in most commonly used implementations, not all IPv6 features are available. For example, current implementations are not very optimized for multicast, despite the many benefits multicast can offer with respect to the number of radio transmissions and the amount of consumed energy. In this paper we present Bidirectional Multicast RPL Forwarding (BMRF), a new multicast protocol that combines the best features of the Routing Protocol for Low Power and Lossy Networks (RPL) multicast on the one hand and of Stateless Multicast RPL Forwarding (SMRF) on the other hand. The main features are bidirectionality and the ability to offer a choice between Link Layer broadcast and Link Layer unicast for which the threshold to decide for a mote, which link layer mode to choose, is mainly based on its number of interested children and the duty cycling rate. An implementation of BMRF is realized in Contiki. Our measurements show that BMRF, when using the optimal configuration, results in less radio transmissions, and less energy consumption, and higher packet delivery ratio compared to SMRF, often at the cost of a higher end-to-end delay.

With the ever-increasing demands for popular content sharing among humans, device-to-device (D2D) multicast communication, as a promising technology to support wireless services within a local area, is introduced in a 5G cellular network. However, the existing resource allocation approaches for D2D multicast communication usually consider only physical domain constraints but neglect social domain factors, which would result in ineffective D2D links between users unwilling to share interests. Different from existing works, the D2D multicast scheme proposed in this paper will produce effective D2D multicast links by sufficiently utilizing both the physical and social properties of mobile users, with the goal to maximize the throughput of the overall social-aware network and guarantee fairly allocation of the channel between different D2D multicast clusters. The scheme mainly consists of two parts, the formation of D2D multicast clusters and joint optimization of power and channel allocation. In the formation of D2D multicast clusters, members and head in each cluster are selected by taking into account both social attributes and physical factors, such as community, ties, and geographical closeness. In the joint optimization, a two-step scheme is designed to first calculate the optimal power allocation by geometric proximity and then select suitable cellular channels for each D2D multicast cluster utilizing an extended one-to-many bipartite graphs matching algorithm. Simulation results demonstrate that, compared with heuristic algorithm and stochastic algorithm, the proposed scheme can increase the throughput of the overall social-aware network by about 5% and 50%, respectively.

A number of today’s over-the-top (OTT) services could greatly benefit from a flexible, efficient, and scalable network-layer multicast support on the Internet. IP multicast showed not to meet these requirements, hindering its adoption in more than individual network islands. As a consequence, content delivery networks (CDNs) emerged as alternative and implemented one-to-many multicasting at the application layer. Yet, due to practical reasons and conflicting stakeholder interests, CDN deployments usually end at the border of Internet service provider networks, making one-to-many deliveries at an Internet-scale challenging up to date. In a previous work, the authors presented software-defined multicast (Sdm) to mitigate this problem by unlocking network-layer multicast support for OTT services inside ISP networks. In this paper, DynSdm is proposed to complement Sdm in key aspects, allowing for a more holistic support of relevant scenarios aspects, and enabling a fine-granular traffic engineering of multicast traffic inside ISP networks. For this, DynSdm presents a detailed design of the ISP-internal traffic and service management process and introduces a set of novel SDN-based network-layer mechanisms for traffic load balancing as well as handling of group and network dynamics. DynSdm was implemented as prototype and extensively evaluated, showing its flexibility, high traffic efficiency, good scalability, and superior ability to balance traffic load inside ISP networks.

WiFi networks have been globally deployed and most mobile devices are currently WiFi-enabled. While WiFi has been proposed for multimedia content distribution, its lack of adequate support for multicast services hinders its ability to provide multimedia content distribution to a large number of devices. In this paper, we present the AMuSe system, whose objective is to enable scalable and adaptive WiFi multicast services. AMuSe is based on accurate receiver feedback and incurs a small control overhead. In particular, we develop an algorithm for dynamic selection of a subset of the multicast receivers as feedback nodes, which periodically send information about the channel quality to the multicast sender. This feedback information can be used by the multicast sender to optimize multicast service quality, e.g., by dynamically adjusting transmission bitrate. AMuSe does not require any changes to the standards or any modifications to the WiFi devices. We implemented AMuSe on the ORBIT testbed and evaluated its performance in large groups with approximately 200 WiFi devices , both with and without interference sources. Our extensive experiments demonstrate that AMuSe can provide accurate feedback in a dense multicast environment. It outperforms several alternatives even in the case of external interference and changing network conditions.

In this paper, an intellectual energy efficient multicast routing protocol is proposed. It achieves enhanced performance over On-Demand Multicast Routing Protocol (ODMRP). The proposed protocol finds energy efficient multicast routes from source node to a group of receivers. Multicast mesh creation involves two phases: a Join Query (J-Q) phase and a Join Reply (J-R) phase. The J-Q phase initiates a route discovery process to find routes of the multicast group. In J-R phase, different routes of the multicast groups are set up. In the proposed protocol, we modify ODMRP and introduce fuzzy inference system to deal with imprecise and partial information during the route discovery phase. The decision maker uses two fuzzy variables such as energy and distance for evaluating reward as an output parameter of each multicast route. This output parameter helps to distinguish different multicast route and it also helps to reduce the effect of mutual interference between routes. The proposed protocol is simulated using the NS-2 simulator. The performance of the proposed protocol is compared with existing multicast routing protocols, and results outperform existing protocols in terms of several network metrics.

Multicast is an efficient method for transmitting the same packets to a group of destinations. In energy-constrained wireless ad hoc networks where nodes are powered by batteries, one of the challenging issues is how to prolong the multicast lifetime. Most of existing work mainly focuses on multicast lifetime maximization problem in wireless packet loss-free networks. However, this may not be the case in reality. In this paper, we are concerned with the multicast lifetime maximization problem in unreliable wireless ad hoc networks. To solve this problem, we first define the multicast lifetime as the number of packets transmitted along the multicast tree successfully. Then we develop a novel lifetime maximization genetic algorithm to construct the multicast tree consisting of high reliability links subject to the source and destination nodes. Simulation results demonstrate the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.

Network based mobility management protocol can be termed as Proxy MIPv6 (PMIPv6). It is introduced as a unicast network based mobility management. Route optimization as well as context transfers approaches are some intra domain multicast support mechanisms in PMIPv6. As for inter domain multicast support mechanism on PMIPv6 domain, global mobility and load balancing are some of the approaches. Enabling multicast support mechanism in PMIPv6 is an important issue. This is because, it is an effective IP multicast communication. Moreover, nowadays application such as IPTV traffic densely populates IP multicast network concerning packet loss, service disruption time, and handover latency are at high priority. The objective of this paper is to quantitatively investigate and analyze intra and inter domain mechanisms for multicast support in PMIPv6. Using total number of signaling and handover latency as the analytical parameters, it also highlights the strengths, the limitations of these mechanisms. After analysis of the prevailing state of the art, an enhanced scheme has proposed in which both route optimization and context transfer techniques are integrated. The proposed scheme can brings entire benefits of the multicast service on PMIPv6 domain

Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6) was initially introduced to assist unicast network-based mobility. In recent years, new approaches have been introduced to provide multicast support in PMIPv6. IP multicast is an imperative mechanism for internet video provision. As the usage of internet data traffic remains to develop rapidly, there is a need to optimize and improve the performance of multicast service. Issues such as large overhead, high packet loss rate, single point of failure, service disruption time, handover latency, and non-route optimization needs to be tackled efficiently. To provide multicast services in PMIPv6, route optimization, global mobility, load balancing and context transfer approaches have been introduced. The foremost aim of this paper is to study and analyze these methods via qualitative analysis. This is to focus the advantages and the limitations of the current approaches.

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is composed of mobile nodes without any infrastructure where member nodes easily can leave or join the network. This issue provides a dynamic topology network such that providing quality of service and multicast services are very challenging tasks. The majority of applications of MANETs are in rapid deployment and dynamic reconfigurations. For these reasons, in this paper, we present an efficient fuzzy logic based multicast routing scheme to adaptively manage the network resources without any prior knowledge about network traffic. Every source node self-organizes the multicast session by using average end to end delay and packet delivery ratio parameters in order to dynamically adjust its own sending rate. The proposed method is a novel framework for multicast services such that it can be deployed by both tree-based and mesh-based multicast routing protocols. In addition, The proposed method uses a cross-layer technique to efficiently manage the congestion. The results show high improvement in terms of number of the retransmissions, delay, packet delivery ratio and overhead compared to the existing multicast schemes.

The objective of this paper is to re-evaluate multicast structures for wireless multihop networks by taking interference into account. We group nodes in multicast routing structures into different classes based on their roles in the multicast routing. Through mathematical analyses of these different node classes under an accurate interference model, we derive optimal routing strategies for the different classes in the presence of interference. These analyses inform the design of four interference-aware multicast routing algorithms. We evaluate the performances of our proposed algorithms using wireless network simulations, where we have implemented a detailed model of wireless communication. We show that, by taking interference into account when building the multicast routing structures, our proposed algorithms are able to significantly improve throughput, delay, and robustness compared to existing multicast routing algorithms, which do not consider interference.

communication over multicast ad hoc network suffers from insufficient utilization of limited resources, i.e. shared channel, battery, data processing capabilities and storage space, etc. Multicast routing protocol should be able to manage all these resources because their consumption depends upon different factors, i.e. Unicast/Multicast network operations, dynamic topology due to mobility, control overhead due to scalability, packet loss and retransmission due to collision and congestion etc. All these factors may cause unnecessary network load, delay and unfair resource utilization. However, multicast ad hoc routing protocols are more efficient than Unicast routing protocols, but they also suffer from performance degradation factors discussed above. Researchers have developed various layer wise solutions for resource optimization. In this paper, we will explore the different schemes for fair utilization of network resources and also perform a simulation based analysis to investigate the impact of MAC layer over the performance of multicast routing protocols and network resources.

In order that multicast routing characteristics is reflected in wireless mesh networks, multicast routing metric is required for quantifying the multicast tree cost under wireless environments. This paper proposes a new multicast routing metric considering receiver's different characteristics of link quality on a wireless multicast channel as well as wireless multicast advantage. The proposed multicast-tree transmission ratio quantifying the multicast tree cost represents the product of the multicast transmission ratios of all nodes in the constructed multicast tree. In this paper, we also propose a wireless multicast routing which constructs the multicast tree by maximizing the multicast-tree transmission ratio in wireless mesh networks with multiple gateways and design the multicast routing protocol based on AODV protocol. Since the multicast tree by our wireless proposed routing algorithm contains the nodes having maximum multicast-node transmission ratio, our proposed multicast routing shows a higher delivery ratio and a lower average delay than original multicast AODV and the multicast routing with minimizing the forwarding nodes in its multicast tree. In comparison with other multicast routings, simulation results show that the proposed multicast heuristics maximizing the multicast-tree transmission ratio construct a cost-effective multicast tree in terms of its delivery ratio, average delay, and required network resources.

The Internet Protocol Version 6 was designed to efficiently improve on the existing functionalities of Internet Protocol Version 4 and to introduce new constructs that it lacks. Though IPv6 is not an extension of IPv4, as the two protocols have different specifications. Both the new and the formal protocol use multicast routing for many of their operations; this implies multicast routing is core in the protocols. This experiment became imperative especially in this era everyone is looking forward to using IPv6 as the default network. This paper tested the performance of IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual local area network. Graphical Network Simulator 3 was used to configure the network and Microsoft Hyper-V was used as the hypervisor on which the six virtual machines (hosts) reside. Parameters such as throughput, latency variations, data loss and the network over heads were examined. The experiment has shown that, IPv6 multicast routing over a virtual network has 100% throughput, the jitter (variations in latency) varies among the hosts in all the running scenarios, but low and stabled jitters were noticed as the running duration increases and the number of streaming increase from one multicast stream to running two multicast streams simultaneously. There was no data loss.

Scalable video coding, together with adaptive modulation and coding, is a promising technique for providing real-time video multicast services on mobile stations (MSs) in heterogeneous channel conditions. On the other hand, since MSs are often powered by batteries, reducing the energy consumption of mobile devices is an important concern. In this paper, we study the problem of scalable video multicast scheduling in a mobile worldwide interoperability for microwave access (WiMAX) network with the objective of maximizing the multicast energy throughput. This problem has never been seriously studied when the assumption that different multicast groups may partially overlap is made. We prove that this problem is NP-complete. Our proposed solution, which is called energy-efficient multicast scheduling with adaptive modulation and coding (EEMS-AMC), consists of three modules, namely, online admission control, base-layer data scheduling, and enhancement-layer data scheduling. The admission control rules not only help the base station to admit the maximum number of video streams but ensure that the video data can be delivered to mobile users within the timeliness requirement as well. Moreover, EEMS-AMC adopts the greedy strategy to schedule base-layer data such that even in the worst-case scenario, the average duty cycle of admitted MSs can be within a bounded factor from the theoretical minimum. Finally, EEMS-AMC employs the metric “expected multicast throughput” to derive the proper modulation and coding scheme for each enhancement-layer data and employs the metric “marginal multicast energy throughput” to efficiently derive near-optimal enhancement-layer data scheduling. Simulation results exhibit that EEMS-AMC achieves relatively good performances in terms of multicast energy throughput and normalized total utility.

In wireless local area networks (WLANs), link-layer multicast is a promising technology for many multimedia applications, e.g., video streaming, as multicast frames can reach multiple clients simultaneously. However, the efficiency of multicast in WLANs is usually low since multicast frames are transmitted at a basic data rate to reach clients with poor channel quality. Moreover, the reliability of multicast cannot be guaranteed either, as multicast transmissions are not acknowledged. Some recent works have utilized smart antennas to improve multicast performance. However, most of them require customized hardware and are not designed for the latest IEEE 802.11 standard, 802.11n WLANs. More importantly, these works did not consider the impact of AP association strategies on the performance of link-layer multicast. In this paper, we study the problem of link-layer multicast in large-scale 802.11n WLANs where each AP is equipped with a smart antenna that supports multiple antenna patterns. Based on channel gains of various antenna patterns from different APs, we choose the associated AP for multicast clients, partition associated clients of each AP into multiple groups, select an antenna pattern and data rate for each group of client, and transmit multicast frames to each group once. We first examine the limitation of multicast in 802.11n WLANs and the benefits of smart antennas to multicast via experiments. We then introduce the system model and formulate the problem into an optimization problem, and prove its NP-hardness. The objective is to minimize the time to transmit a multicast frame to all clients while guaranteeing high packet reception ratio (PRR) for each client. For generic WLANs where APs are sparsely deployed, we propose an optimal algorithm under the condition that the PRR of antenna patterns and data rates are known for every client. For generic large-scale WLANs, we further propose an on-line algorithm in which the AP association strategy, the partition of clients, the antenna pattern and data rate of each group are adapted dynamically, based on PRR reports from clients. We have implemented the on-line algorithm on off-the-shelf WLAN products, and conducted extensive experiments and simulations to evaluate the performance. The results show that the proposed algorithm can significantly improve multicast performance compared to other schemes, and at the same time guarantee high PRR for all clients.

An MAODV is an extension of AODV protocol. It's one of the efficient multicast tree structures. So many techniques are used to improve the performance of MAODV protocol such that performance like PDR, latency, energy. In minimum load adhoc networks the multicast route to recovery is effective. Merely, in maximum load network condition large number of packets discarded and poor robustness of the tree based protocols appears. This paper represents a way to improve the packet deliver ratio, latency and energy consumption of the system by using backup paths and to choose the best path among backup paths using genetic algorithm (GA) by using best fitness value for further transmission during route repair occurs. The validity of the tree based multicast protocols is improved by holding a network structure using backup paths. The efficiency of the tree structure is improved by using GA in the mesh structure created by backup paths. It not merely improves the reliability it also reduces the control and data overhead in the multicast tree. The operation of the system is measured by applying the simulation tool NS-2. Ultimately the performance is compared with MAODV protocol and current methods.

The growing demand for mobile multicast services, such as Internet Protocol television (IPTV) and video streaming, requires effective radio resource management (RRM) to handle traffic with strict quality-of-service constraints over Long-Term Evolution (LTE) and beyond systems. Special care is needed to limit system performance degradation when multiple multicast streams are simultaneously transmitted. To this aim, this paper proposes an RRM policy based on a subgrouping technique for the delivery of scalable multicast video flows in a cell. Our proposal enhances the legacy multicast transmission over LTE systems by exploiting multiuser diversity and the users' channel quality feedbacks. Moreover, it is designed to take advantage of the frequency selectivity in the subgroup formation. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed scheme, which outperforms existing approaches from the literature. It succeeds in achieving higher spectral efficiency and guaranteeing adequate video quality to all multicast receivers and improved quality to those with good channel conditions.

Several unicast and multicast routing protocols have been presented for MPSoCs. Multicast protocols in NoCs are used for cache coherency in distributed shared memory systems, replication, barrier synchronization, or clock synchronization. Unicast routing algorithms are not suitable for multicast, as they increase traffic, congestion and deadlock probability. Famous multicast schemes such as tree-based and path-based schemes have been proposed originally for multicomputers and recently adapted to NoCs. In this paper, we propose a switch tree-based multicast scheme, called STBA. This method supports tree construction with a minimum number of routers. Our evaluation results reveal that, for both synthetic and real traffic loads, the proposed scheme outperforms the baseline tree-based routing scheme in a conventional mesh by up to 41% and reduces power consumption by up to 29%.

A physical-layer-impairment (PLI)-awareness based optical multicast mechanism is proposed for OpenFlow controlled optical networks. This proposed approach takes the PLI models including linear and non-linear factors into optical multicast controlled by OpenFlow protocol. Thus, the proposed scheme is able to cover nearly all PLI factors of each optical link and to conduct optical multicast with better communication quality. Simulation results show that the proposed scheme can obtain the better performance of OpenFlow controlled optical multicast services.

With the explosive growth of cloud-based services, large-scale data centers are widely built for housing critical computing resources to gain significant economic benefits. In data centers, the cloud services are generally accomplished by multicast-based group communications. Recently, many well-known industries, such as Microsoft, Google, and IBM, adopt high-speed wireless technologies to augment network capacity in data centers. However, those well-known multicast delivery schemes for traditional wired data centers do not consider the unique characteristics of wireless communications, which may result in unnecessary data transmissions and network congestions. Under the coexisting scenario of wired and wireless links, this paper studies multicast tree construction and maintenance problems. The objective is to minimize the total multicast traffic. We prove the problems are $\mathcal {NP}$ -hard and propose efficient heuristic algorithms for the two problems. Based on real traces and practical settings obtained from commercial data centers, a series of experiments are conducted, and the experimental results show that our proposed algorithms are effective for reducing multicast data traffic. The results also provide useful insights into the design of multicast tree construction and maintenance for wireless data center networks.

An efficient algorithm for routing multicast traffic using recursive partition is proposed.A novel and easy method for minimizing the link usage of a multicast tree is introduced.This algorithm uses minimal adaptive routing to balance the multicast traffic loads. Network-on-Chips (NoCs) have become the mainstream for Chip Multi-Processors (CMPs) design. Multicast, a one-to-many communication pattern, is widely used in barrier/clock synchronization, multithreading programs and cache coherence protocols for CMPs. Even though several multicast routing algorithms have been proposed for CMPs, few can adaptively deal with heavy traffic loads. With the increase of multicast traffic load, deterministic routing schemes suffer from long latency and low throughput, whereas adaptive routing algorithms can improve the routing performance by providing multiple redundant paths. In this paper, we proposed a novel multicast routing algorithm based on partition to reduce the latency of multicast packets, by finding multiple routing paths and adaptively choosing available output ports based on the size of buffer space in downstream routers. We evaluate our scheme through simulations, and results show that, under various configurations, both latency and energy consumption have been significantly reduced in comparison with recent multicast routing schemes. Display Omitted

Dynamically changing of network topology due to node movement is considered a main challenge in providing reliable and low-cost paths in one to many ends of communication in mobile ad hoc networks. To address this challenge, this paper proposes a scheduled-links multicast routing protocol (SLMRP) based on mobility prediction. SLMRP constructs multiple scheduled paths between multicast sources and receivers. SLMRP scheduled paths are subject to reliability and quality of service requirements in load-balance strategy. Multiple loop-free and node-disjoint paths are constructed for each source-receiver pair during route discovery process. To control the activation and deactivation of these paths, we introduce multicast routing activation timer (MRAT) and path timeout timer (PTT). MRAT and PTT are computed according to the route expiration time for the set of the discovering paths. Performance comparison results demonstrate that the proposed protocol outperforms PUMA, MAODV, and PMRP.

It is usual that the applications executed in data centers require the distribution of the same data from one node to others at various execution points and that some of them require to cope with multiple of these diffusions in parallel. Multicast-based communications are an alternative solution to sending data efficiently to multiple nodes. This paper proposes a novel technique which offers reliability and congestion control in the multi-multicast transfers in data center networks. The proposal is based on: (1) a new congestion control mechanism, which monitors the control information of the receivers, reducing the server injection rate, (2) taking advantage of the switch diffusion hardware, and (3) using IGMP snooping, which allows a network switch to multicast a packet just to the output links with host receivers joined to a multicast group. The implementation is made at user level and uses the UDP interface. Evaluation tests are performed in a CentOS-based cluster composed of 12 servers in the presence of multiple diffusions at the same time. Test results show improvements in the global bandwidth, avoid network saturation, and reduce overhead included by unicast communications in data transmission.

In this paper, we investigate public safety communications based on LTE-Advanced mobile networks. This work has a twofold aim, (i) to secure optimal radio resource efficiency using a mix of synchronous and asynchronous multicast traffic, and (ii) to provide public safety services with minimal interruptions due to mobility in a heterogeneous network environment.To this end, we propose and evaluate three different options for multicast resource allocation: a synchronous scheme, where all multicast cells operate with the same modulation scheme as a single frequency network; an asynchronous scheme, where base stations can decide in a distributed fashion on the multicast configuration; and a coordinated scheme where a central network management entity selects the multicast configuration in a network.For the performance evaluation, different network deployment alternatives and the impact on delay critical group communications using unicast and multicast bearers are analyzed. Different user distributions and mobility scenarios were also considered. We evaluate these schemes using system level simulations with 3GPP LTE-Advanced settings, analyzing the performance in terms of - resource efficiency, energy savings in macro-cellular networks, and optimization of signaling load in heterogeneous networks. From the numerical results, we observe significant gains in terms of resource efficiency as well as power consumption reductions for the multicast scheme over unicast, with minimal impacts due to mobility. The results also indicate that the scheme is flexible enough to handle different types of user distributions and mobility conditions, without compromising the resource utilization efficiency.

Buffer management techniques are essential while handling multicast streaming in MANET since real-time data will involve playback delay and jitter. In this paper, an efficient buffer management protocol is developed for streaming data in multicast groups. The frequently requested video data can be buffered in any intermediate nodes along the multicast tree from the source to the receivers. When packets are received, they are classified as real-time or non-real-time and placed into respective queues. Cumulative weight of the packets in the real-time buffer is then estimated based on number of hops, deadline and waiting time. Based on the estimated weight value, transmission priorities are assigned. The buffer space is dynamically adjusted depending on the number of intermediate nodes along the multicast tree from the source to the receivers. Simulation results show that the proposed buffer management protocol reduces the latency and energy consumption while increasing the packet delivery ratio.

The mobile network operators are being challenged by the explosion of mobile data traffic in terms of network performance and generated revenue. On one hand, efficient mobility management plays a crucial role to support mobile users, however, the current mobility protocols have several major limitations from their centralized and hierarchical nature (e.g., sub-optimal routing, scalability and reliability issues). Distributed mobility management (DMM) is a new, very promising trend to overcome these limitations by flattening the network architecture and dynamically providing the mobility support. Based on the fact that the mobile Internet traffic will be dominated by the mobile video, the scalability and bandwidth efficiency from multicast routing makes the IP multicast play a crucial role. However, one of the main challenges for multicast support is the mobility of a multicast node, leading to several issues for both multicast service and network operator such as long service disruption, high end-to-end delay, non-optimal routing and traffic replication. Driven from the fact that different multicast flows have very different characteristics and each network operator has different policies for multicast support, we propose a dynamic multicast support scheme (DMMS), taking into account both the user and network operator point of view. DMMS allows to dynamically provide the appropriate multicast support mode based on a set of contexts such as the service’s characteristics, mobility of the node and network context to adapt to the service’s requirements as well as operator’s policies.

This memo defines an experimental portion of the Management Information Base for use with network management protocols in the Internet community. In particular, it describes managed objects common to both VPLS and VPN Multicast.

Many distributed services need to be scalable: internet search, electronic commerce, e-government... In order to achieve scalability, high availability and fault tolerance, such applications rely on replicated components. Because of the dynamics of growth and volatility of customer markets, applications need to be hosted by adaptive, highly scalable systems. In particular, the scalability of the reliable multicast mechanisms used for supporting the consistency of replicas is of crucial importance. Reliable multicast might propagate updates in a pre-determined order (e.g., FIFO, total or causal). Since total order needs more communication rounds than causal order, the latter appears to be the preferable candidate for achieving multicast scalability, although the consistency guarantees based on causal order are weaker than those of total order. This paper provides a historical survey of different scalability approaches for reliable causal multicast protocols., This work was supported by European Regional Development Fund (FEDER) and Ministerio de Economia y Competitividad (MINECO) under research Grant TIN2012-37719-C03-01.