UDP-tunneling based multicast connectivity solution for multi-party collaborative environments

The Access Grid (AG) provides collaboration environments over the IP multicast networks by enabling efficient exchange of multimedia contents among remote users; however, since lots of current networks are still multicast-disabled, it is not easy to deploy this multicast-based multi-party AG. For this problem, the AG provides multicast bridges as a solution by putting a relay server into the multicast networks. Multicast-disabled clients make UDP connections with this relay server and receives forwarded multicast traffics in unicast UDP packets. This solution is facing several limitations since it requires duplicate forwarding of the same packet for each unicast peer. Thus, in this paper, we propose an alternate solution for the multicast connectivity problem of the AG based on the UMTP (UDP multicast tunneling protocol). By taking advantage of flexibilities of UMTP, the proposed solution is designed to improve the efficiency of network and system utilization, to allow reuse of multicast-based AG applications without modification, and to partially address the NAT/firewall traversal issues. To verify the feasibility of proposed solution, we have implemented a prototype AG connectivity tool based on the UMTP, named as the AG Connector.