All things related to multicast

[Venketesan <>]

Hi all,
I am bringing to your notice an automated tunneling protocol for IP 
multicast called IMcast Tunneling Protocol or ITP. It has been 
designed to address one of main deployment problem with IP multicast 
i.e. tunneling. 
Project website and complete protocol specification at: 
www.iit.edu/~venkthi1/imcast1.html

Following is a brief of the protocol:

ITP, when deployed at the border routers of multicast aware islands, 
enables their implicit connectivity to other such islands that are 
separated by a unicast network. The tunnel configurations are created 
and torn down as per the dynamic group memberships of the hosts within 
the islands. As more IP multicast aware islands with ITP border 
routers are commissioned in between a certain existing inter domain 
connectivity, the multicast awareness of the new domains is 
incorporated to optimize the number of packet copies transported. It 
is not a pure end-to-end connectivity scheme between the islands but 
enables progressive deployment for IP multicast. To the best of our 
knowledge no tunneling scheme has this property. The message 
propagation is through reverse shortest path which is more efficient 
compared to the MBONE. Bottle necks have also been avoided. Being 
operational at the network layer the packet processing complexity is 
lesser and switching faster compared to the transport layer tunneling. 
The ability of ITP to transparently exchange multicast packets has 
been validated and demonstrated with a working prototype in INFOCOM 
2005, by means of a video conference between nodes in Miami and 
chicago. The implementation was done in Linux kernel space.Hosts in IP 
multicast/ITP unaware domains can install ITP stack and enable their 
multicast connectivity across the Internet.

I would greatly appreciate your feedback and would be glad to address 
any queries.

regards,
Venkat