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. Index Terms--IP multicasting, source filtering.