Deployment Issues for the IP Multicast Service and Architecture ¢ Christophe Diot* Brian Neil Levine Bryan Lyles* Hassan Kassem ¡ Doug Balensiefen ¦ ¤ ¥ *Sprint Advanced Technology Labs £ Computer Science Department SprintLink Sprint 1 Adrian Court University of Massachusetts 12502 Sunrise Valley Dr. 2002 Edmund Halley Dr. Burlingame, CA Amherst, MA Reston, VA Reston, VA cdiot,
[email protected] [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] commercial implementation of multicast. Some of Abstract these issues include: • IP multicast offers scalable point-to-multipoint delivery Group management, including authorization necessary for using group communication applications for group creation, receiver authorization, and on the Internet. However, the IP multicast service has sender authorization. seen slow commercial deployment by ISPs and carriers. • Distributed multicast address allocation. The original service model was designed without a clear • Security, including protection against attacks understanding of commercial requirements or a robust on multicast routes and sessions, as well as implementation strategy. The very limited number of support for data integrity mechanisms. applications and the complexity of the architectural de- • Support for network management. sign — which we believe is a consequence of the open Consequently, the current IP-multicast archi- service model — have deterred widespread deployment tecture deployed by carriers and Internet Service as well. We examine the issues that have limited the Providers (ISPs) to compensate for these issues is commercial deployment of IP-multicast from the view- complex and has limited scalability. Trying to gen- point of carriers. We analyze where the model fails, what it does not offer, and we discuss requirements for suc- eralize and commercialize multicast from the cur- cessful deployment of multicast services.