Abstract:
After a decade of research and development, IP multicast has
still not been deployed widely in the global Internet due lo many
open technical issues: lack of admission control, poorly scaled
with large number of groups. and requiring substantial
infrastructure modifications. To provide the benefits of IP
multicast without requiring direct router support or the presence
of a physical broadcast medium, various Application Level
Multicast (ALW) models have been attempted. However, there are
still several problems with ALM: unnecessary coupling between an
application and its multicasting supports, bottleneck problem at
network access links and considerable processing power required
at the end nodes to support ALM mechanism. This paper proposes
an architecture to address these problems by delegating
application-multicasting support mechanisms to smart edge
devices associated with the application end nodes. The
architecture gives rise to an interesting Edge Device Any-casting
technology that lies between the IP-multicasting and the
Application Layer Multicasting and enjoys the benefits of both.
Furthermore, the architecture may provide sufficient cost-benefit
for adoption by service providers. The paper presents initial
results obtained from the implementation of a video streaming
application over the testbed that implements the proposed
architecture.
