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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.

The chapter describes an architecture to relay on demand a real-time IP multicast audio-video stream broadcasted by a satellite on a terrestrial link. The stream is received by suitably equipped sites and then relayed to other sites that are not equipped with satellite receiving hardware but are nonetheless willing to receive the stream. By exploiting the properties of satellite transmission and adopting a hybrid satellite/terrestrial, multicast/unicast approach, the described architecture allows to overcome the restrictions suffered by multicast traffic in the global Internet, allowing it to scale easily across autonomous systems. All things considered, the proposed architecture outlines a large-scale interactive audio-video distribution system similar to those based on Content Distribution Networks (CDNs) and it compares favourably with them when performances, costs and scalability are examined.

Scalable video coding is a promising technique to enable flexible video transmission for heterogeneous terminals and varying channel throughput. However, it is challenging to perform in-network adaptation in conventional networks because the network nodes are uncontrollable and transparent for media streaming applications. Software-defined networking (SDN) is an attractive network technology that supports the applications to collaborate with network nodes to achieve intelligent and dynamic service provisioning. Against this changing network landscape, we redesign the scalable multimedia multicast streaming by exploiting the complete network knowledge of the SDN controller to enable intelligent scalable video transmission. The proposed scalable multimedia multicast streaming framework is capable of in-network identifying, processing, and manipulating the media streams. In order to achieve the in-network adaptation, we apply equivalent bandwidth theory to estimate the affordable video layers that a link may accommodate, and apply finite-state machine to implement adaptive enhancement layer switching for multicast paths. In contrast to IP multicast, the proposed method is a controllable multicast scheme, which provides admission control in a multicast context, in-network adaptation, and supporting heterogeneous devices having different display capability. We further implement a prototype for illustrating the success of the proposed solution. The experimental results are also presented to show the effectiveness of the proposed equivalent bandwidth based adaptive enhancement layer switching algorithm.

Due to significant advances in wireless modulation technologies, some MAC standards such as 802.11a, 802.11b, and 802.11g can operate with multiple data rates for QoS-constrained multimedia communication to utilize the limited resources of MANETs more efficiently. In this paper, by means of measuring the busy/idle ratio of the shared radio channel, a method for estimating one-hop delay is first suggested. Then, by constructing a multicast tree, a delay-sensitive multicast protocol for real-time applications in multirate MANETs is proposed. In order to increase the network capacity, the proposed multicast protocol intends to minimize the sum of the total transmission time of the forwarders and the total blocking time of the blocked hosts, by taking the neighboring information of the forwarders into account and properly adjusting the data rates of the forwarders. Simulation results show that the proposed delay estimation method is more accurate, as compared with previous works. Besides, the proposed multicast protocol can induce higher network capacity, while satisfying the delay requirement.

Multicasting can reduce network traffic in multiuser systems by serving multiple users simultaneously. The benefits of multicasting basically come from the overlapping and synchronism of user requests. Pushing and caching are techniques that prestore content items in buffers closer to users based on the prediction of user requests, thereby providing a promising approach to eliminating the asynchronism of user requests and creating multicasting opportunities. This paper studies a multiuser wireless communication system, in which the buffers for caching are deployed in the user terminals. Based on the request delay information (RDI) which describes when the users request content items in a deterministic or statistical way, a joint pushing and caching (JPC) method is presented to schedule the content items pushed by the base station and cached in the user buffers. In this paper, multicasting JPC systems work in two modes, without or with the feedback of RDI. Furthermore, RDI is classified into three forms, namely, noncausal, statistical, and causal. Static and dynamic JPC policies are, respectively, proposed for the two work modes. In addition, the effective throughput resulting from JPC under the three forms of RDI is demonstrated via theoretical analysis and simulation.

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 an important way to diffuse data in duty-cycled wireless sensor networks (WSNs), where nodes can receive data only in active state. The communication delay can be extremely large if inappropriate schedules are adopted. Unfortunately, most previous methods do not consider controlling multicast delay energy-efficiently. This paper studies the minimum active time slot augmentation for delay-bounded multicast (MAADM) problem in duty-cycled WSNs. The MAADM problem is proved to be NP-hard even under the node-exclusive interference model. An optimal algorithm is proposed for the MAADM problem when $K=2$ and a heuristic latency bounding algorithm is proposed for source-to-all communications, where $K$ denotes the number of the destination nodes. When $K>2$ , two ( $K$ −1)-approximation algorithms are designed for the MAADM problem. In addition, a low computation-complexity distributed algorithm is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first work that develops a series of efficient centralized and distributed algorithms for the MAADM problem in duty-cycled WSNs. The theoretical analysis and experimental results verify that all the proposed algorithms have high performance in terms of delivery delay and energy consumption.

Cognitive radio is a prominent technology for improving radio spectrum efficiency. In this paper, we study an underlay cognitive radio network (CRN), consisting of a cognitive base station (CBS) and multiple multicast group of secondary users (SUs). A common primary user (PU) channel is used to support multicast services to a group of SUs. Our objective is to minimize the outage probability of the SU multicast groups. The problem is formulated using constrained optimization framework under the constraints of PUs’ outage probability and CBS’s average transmit power. An efficient transmit power allocation scheme, which determines the optimal power for each SU multicast group, is proposed. Simulation results are presented to validate the proposed power allocation scheme, thereby improving the spectrum efficiency of the CRN.

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.

Secondary users (SUs) can flexibly access licensed channels to improve the spectrum utilization in cognitive radio networks (CRNs). In mobile cognitive radio ad hoc networks (MCRAHNs) where nodes can move, SUs are intermittently connected because of node mobility, as well as the uncertain channel availability. Providing multicast services in MCRAHNs is urgently needed with the compelling demand on service qualities and varieties, and the proliferation of cognitive technology. The benefits of network coding over multicast in traditional wireless networks or CRNs have been well demonstrated in existing works. However, the existing studies merely address the two crucial issues (i.e., uncertain channel availability and node mobility) together and, thereby, cannot be applied to network coding-based multicast in MCRAHNs. In this paper, we study the problem of network coding-based multicast in MCRAHNs considering both channel uncertainty and node mobility. We utilize discrete-time Markov chains to model the channel availability and node mobility in MCRAHNs, and we then formulate a spectrum-aware network coded multicast problem as an optimization problem, which minimizes the total transmission cost, subject to the timely successful delivery constraint and link transmission constraint. Since the formulated problem is hard to tackle according to mixed integer programing, we further design a distributed spectrum-aware cost-based (SACB) scheme based on the metric of forwarding benefit. With extensive simulations based on both synthetic and realistic traces, we show that, compared with existing schemes, SACB can achieve almost the minimum transmission cost while maintaining high multicast success probability.

Distributed mobility management (DMM) is currently being researched and standardized in academia and standardization development organizations for the purpose of overcoming the major issues of existing centralized mobility management. The most recent DMM protocols are being redesigned with regard to the control and data plane separation concept. However, at present, there is no solution for supporting IP multicast listeners in such new DMM environments. In this paper, we review ongoing academic research works, standardization activities and propose an IP multicast mobility design for the DMM environment using the control and data plane concept.

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.

Mobile Ad Hoc Networking Does Not Own Any Fixed Infrastructure And Hence, Stable Routing Is The Major Problem. The Mobility Nature Of Manet’s Node Facilitates Rediscovery Of A New Path To Organizing A Routing. In Order To Intensify The Quality Of Service And Routing Stability In Manet, We Propose A Dynamic Quality Of Service Stability Based Multicast Routing Protocol By Modifying The Cuckoo Search Algorithm Through A Modernizing Mechanism Which Is Derived From The Differential Evolution Algorithm. Tuned Csa Is A Combined Feature Of Csa And De Algorithms. Periodically, Each Node In The Network Creates Neighbour Stability And Qos Database At Every Node By Calculating The Parameters Like Node And Link Stability Factor, Bandwidth Availability, And Delays. Finally, Multicast Path Constructs Route Request And Route Reply Packets, Stability Information And Performing Route Maintenance.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The default multicast transport of the IEEE 802.11 standard does not use any feedback policy to detect and retransmit missing packets. Consequently, it has a limited reliability. In this paper we introduce the Block Negative Acknowledgment (BNAK) protocol as a solution for a reliable multicast transport in wireless networks. Using BNAK, the Access Point (AP) transmits a block of multicast packets followed by a Block Negative acknowledgement Request (BNR). Upon the reception of a BNR, a multicast member sends a BNAK response, only if it has some missing packets. A BNAK is acknowledged and therefore is delivered reliably to the AP. Moreover it is transmitted after channel contention in order to avoid eventual collisions with other feedbacks. Under the assumption that (1) the receiver is located within the coverage area of the sender, (2) the multicast packets are delivered using the appropriate data rate and (3) the collisions are avoided, the Packet Error Rate (PER) of the network becomes very low. To guarantee a limited PER, BNAK requires the use of a collision prevention feature (such as CTS-to-Self), and defines a retirement/reactivation procedure. Thus few feedbacks are generated and the bandwidth is saved. We show that our protocol has very high scalability and outperforms the proposals defined by 802.11v and 802.11aa considerably. Particularly our protocol can achieve a throughput exceeding 10 times that of GCR-BACK.

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

This document describes the IP multicast traceroute facility, named Mtrace version 2 (Mtrace2). Unlike unicast traceroute, Mtrace2 requires special implementations on the part of routers. This specification describes the required functionality in multicast routers, as well as how an Mtrace2 client invokes a query and receives a reply.

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.

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.

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.

Mobile IPTV applications are becoming very popular worldwide. According to CISCO research, mobile Internet video usage is increasing rapidly each year and soon reaching zettabyte threshold in 2019. With the increase number of traffic, it is a great effort for internet service provider to provide acceptable network performance. The objective of this paper is to mathematically evaluate a new proposed mobile multicast technique to support high performance mobile IP traffic. The new technique enhanced multicast services in Network Mobility Management which is Proxy Mobile IPv6 (PMIPv6). The evaluation is done using mathematical equations that are derived from signaling call flow of the multicast process in the proposed technique. Results are analyzed and compared with the current base solution technique. Using mathematical analysis this paper validates and highlights the strengths of the proposed technique compared to the existing technique.

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.

In mobile adhoc networks the group oriented communications is very important. Multicasting is an efficient transmission of packets to a group of zero or more hosts. We propose an efficient scalable, reliable and stable multicast routing protocol using hybrid link prediction technique. It is based on Efficient Geographic Multicast protocol EGMP. The main objective is to find scalable and stable routes that reduce the number of hosts that participates in packet forwarding in order to reduce bandwidth and energy. It can be achieved by selecting Backbone Nodes BN. To determine the back bone nodes we consider low mobility nodes in a large group of receivers. From this approach low mobility nodes can be act as BN with fewer forwarders.

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 classical service model of IP multicast is open; anyone can receive multicast data. When using this model, it is impossible to ensure that receivers are authorized to receive the data, or (if appropriate) to generate any revenue from a service based on open multicast. This has resulted in restricted deployment of IP multicast.We have developed a secure IP multicast architecture to enforce receiver access control at two levels: application level and network level. This paper addresses the design and validation of the solution at the network level. The design starts from four assumptions, which express the independence of the network-level solution from the previous work at the application level. At the network level, receiver access control is achieved using two proposed protocols: Secure Internet Group Management Protocol (SIGMP) and Group Security Association Management (GSAM) protocol.SIGMP is an extension to IGMP, in which the messages that are related to secure groups are protected by IPsec Group Security Associations (GSAs). GSAM manages the IPsec GSAs used in SIGMP and couples the network-level access control with the application-level access control.The design requirements for SIGMP and for GSAM are expressed in terms of Design Criteria and Security Goals. These design requirements are then used to justify the final design. Several security properties of GSAM have been formally validated using AVISPA and the remaining security properties of our proposal have been analyzed.

In this paper, we propose virtual direction multicast (VDM) for video multicast applications on peer-to-peer overlay networks. It locates the end hosts relative to each other based on a virtualized orientation scheme using real-time measurements. It builds multicast tree by connecting the nodes, which are estimated to be in the same virtual direction. By using the concept of directionality, we target to use minimal resources in the underlying network while satisfying users' quality expectations. We compare VDMagainst host multicast tree protocol.We simulated the protocol in a network simulator and implemented in PlanetLab. Results both fromsimulation and PlanetLab implementation show that our proposed technique exhibits good performance in terms of defined metrics.

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.