In this paper, we consider the problem of multicast routing and wavelength assignment (MC-RWA) in multi-fiber all-optical WDM networks. Two main network design system comprehensively investigated here are mesh and multi-ring designs. Given the multicast traffic demands, we present new ILP formulations to solve the MC-RWA problem with an objective to determine the minimal number of fibers needed to support the multicast requests. Unlike previous studies, our ILP formulations are not only capable of finding the optimal multicast routing and wavelength assignment pattern to the light-trees, but also finding the optimal light-tree structures simultaneously. Since broadcast and unicast communications are special cases of multicast communications, our ILP models are actually the generalized RWA mathematical models of optical WDM networks. In addition to proposing the ILP models, this paper takes two main issues affecting the network capacity requirement into account, that is, the splitting degree level of optical splitters and techniques of wavelength assignment to the light-trees. Three multicast wavelength assignment techniques studied in this paper are Light-Tree (LT), Virtual Light-Tree (VLT) and Partial Virtual Light-Tree (PVLT) techniques. Due to the NP-completeness of the MC-RWA problem, the ILP formulations can reasonably cope with small and moderate networks. To work with large networks, this paper presents alternative MC-RWA ILP-based heuristic algorithms for the PVLT and LT networks and develops lower bound techniques to characterize the performance of our algorithms. Using existing large backbone networks, numerical results are reported to analyze such aspects as multiple fiber systems, the benefits of using optical splitters and wavelength converters, and the capacity difference between the mesh and multi-ring designs. Finally, this paper provides an analysis of the influence of network connectivity on the network implementation under the constraints of mesh and multi-ring design schemes.

Active Reliable Multicast (ARM) is a novel loss recovery scheme for large-scale reliable multicast that employs active routers to protect the sender and network bandwidth from unnecessary feedback and repair traffic. Active routers perform NACKs suppression, cache multicast data for local loss recovery, and use scoped retransmission to avoid exposure. Limited active resources at routers need to be optimized to achieve low loss recovery latency and/or high network throughput. In this paper, we study the cache placement strategies and caching policies for ARM. Several heuristics, namely uniform allocation, proportional allocation, max-min fair share and weighted allocation for cache allocation methods are proposed. To further improve the loss recovery performance, caching policies can be employed in conjunction with the cache allocation strategies. Several caching policies, namely complete caching, random caching and deterministic caching, are proposed. Extensive simulation experiments are conducted to evaluate and compare the performance of the proposed strategies and policies. Numerical results reveal that significant performance gains can be achieved when a proper cache placement strategy and a caching policy are used for a given available cache resource. Another interesting finding is that the contributions of the cache placement scheme and caching policy to the recovery latency performance are roughly independent. The obtained insights in this study will provide some design guidelines for optimal active resource allocation and caching polices for reliable multicast communications.

In this letter, we propose to construct reliable overlay data delivery tree based on group member's packet loss rate while preserving end-to-end delay below predetermined threshold. Through practical simulation, performance is evaluated and compared.

Recently, with the explosive growth of communication technologies, group oriented services such as teleconferencing and multi-player games are increasing. Access to information is controlled through secret communication using a group key shared among members, so efficient updating of group keys is vital to maintaining secrecy of large and dynamic groups. In this paper, we employ (2,4)-tree as a key tree, which is a height balanced tree, to reduce the number of key updates caused by joins or leaves of members. Specifically, we use the CBT (Core Based Tree) to determine the network configuration of the group members to reflect that onto the structure of the key tree. This allows for more efficient updates of group keys when splitting or merging of subgroups occurs by network failure or recovery.

The block-based fast transmission scheme, which is one of typical stored video delivery schemes, is reasonable in terms of its bandwidth efficiency and tolerance to the delay jitter, etc. However, it causes packet loss because of its burst data transmission method. Thus, we propose a slotted multicast scheme for MPEG video based on the block transmission scheme to maintain a higher quality and to include time constraints. We define two delivery units, the "GoPs Group" and the "Frame Type," on the basis of the MPEG characteristics with periodical NACK feedback from the clients. The former is tolerant to burst packet loss, and the latter gives priority to important frames. Our block multicast has two phases: a "Transmission Phase" and a "Retransmission Phase." In the former, a server multicasts a block, and in the latter, a server retransmits lost packets using multicast according to the proper delivery unit. We evaluate our proposal from some viewpoints with a computer simulation. We also measure the quality of the video reflected the result of a computer simulation. From these results, we confirm performance effectiveness of our proposal.

This paper presents an application-level QoS comparison of three inter-destination synchronization schemes: the master-slave destination scheme, the synchronization maestro scheme, and the distributed control scheme. The inter-destination synchronization adjusts the output timing among destinations in a multicast group for live audio and video streaming over the Internet/intranets. We compare the application-level QoS of these schemes by simulation with the Tiers model, which is a sophisticated network topology model and reflects hierarchical structure of the Internet. The comparison clarifies their features and finds the best scheme in the environment. The simulation result shows that the distributed control scheme provides the highest quality of inter-destination synchronization among the three schemes in heavily loaded networks, while in lightly loaded networks the other schemes can have almost the same quality as that of the distributed control scheme.

In this paper, we propose the Synchronized Mobile Multicast (SMM) scheme for the real-time multimedia service to achieve three most important characteristics that the traditional Home Subscription (HS) and Remote Subscription (RS) mobile schemes cannot support. First, the SMM scheme supports the scalable one-to-many and many-to-many synchronized multimedia multicast on mobile IP networks to achieves seamless playback of continuous media streams even when both the mobile sender and receivers handoff simultaneously. Second, it analyzes the minimal buffer requirements of the mobile sender, the core router, the foreign agents and the mobile receivers in the multicast tree and formulates the initial playback delay within a handoff Guarantee Region (GR). Further, combined with the fine granularity scalability (FGS) encoding approach in the MPEG-4 standard, the SMM scheme achieves superior multimedia QoS guarantees and unlimited numbers of handoffs of the mobile sender and receivers only at the cost of degraded video quality for a short period after handoff with minimal extra bandwidth.

This paper proposes dynamic distributed unicast and multicast routing algorithms for multiple classes of QoS guaranteed networks. Each link in such a network is assumed to be able to provide multiple classes of QoS guarantee by reserving various amounts of resource. A distributed unicast routing algorithm, DCSP (Distributed Constrained Shortest Path), for finding a QoS constrained least cost path between each O-D (Originating-Destination) pair, is proposed first. Two class reduction schemes, the linear and logarithmic policies, are develpoed to prevent exponential growth of the number of end-to-end QoS classes. Based on DCSP, two distributed multicast routing algorithms, DCSPT (Distributed Constrained Shortest Path Tree) and DTM (Distributed Takahashi and Mutsuyama), are proposed to find QoS constrained minimum cost trees. Numerical results indicate that DCSP strongly outperforms previously proposed centralized algorithms and it works better with the linear class reduction method. For the multicast routing algorithms, the DCSPT with linear class reduction method yields the best performance of all multicast routing algorithms.

In this paper, we study a work-conserving multicast scheduling with fanout splitting in a switch, which routes incoming packets asynchronously without fragmentation into cells. A new switch architecture is proposed, which distributes the input links to P variable length packet switching fabrics (VPS) with every G input links sharing GR inlets of the VPS. The system performance is analyzed by queueing analysis to express the maximum throughput and packet delay in terms of the system parameters and traffic characteristics. A practical switch design is also proposed to realize almost the same scheduling as the work-conserving one. We have surveyed how the fanout distribution affects the performance of the switch through Fanout Function, which is defined and studied to help the design of a multicast switch. We show how Fanout Function determines the maximum throughput and packet delay. Various fanout distributions are compared. The mixed fanout distribution exhibits better performance while the deterministic fanout can be used as a bound in the design of a multicast switch. We optimize R and P to attain 100% maximum throughput under limited switch complexity. When the mean fanout size is large, we can use less hardware to achieve the optimal performance by using our architecture. The proposed realization of this switch can be implemented easily due to its modular design. It is scalable because distributed output contention resolution and routing are used instead of a central arbitrator. Its performance is verified by simulation. The result matches the theoretical work-conserving scheduling very well.

Cluster computation has been used in the applications that demand performance, reliability, and availability, such as cluster server groups, large-scale scientific computations, distributed databases, distributed media-on-demand servers and search engines etc. In those applications, multicast can play the vital roles for the information dissemination among groups of servers and users. This paper proposes a set of novel efficient fault-tolerant multicast routing algorithms on hypercube interconnection of cluster computers using multicast shared tree approach. We present some new algorithms for selecting an optimal core (root) and constructing the shared tree so as to minimize the average delay for multicast messages. Simulation results indicate that our algorithms are efficient in the senses of short end-to-end average delay, load balance and less resource utilizations over hypercube cluster interconnection networks.

A new inter-client synchronization framework employing a server-client coordinated adaptive playout and error control toward one-to-many (i.e., multicast) media streaming is discussed in this paper. The proposed adaptive playout mechanism controls the playout speed of audio and video by adopting the time-scale modification of audio. Based on the overall synchronization status as well as the buffer occupancy level, the playout speed of each client is manipulated within a perceptually tolerable range. By coordinating the playout speed of each client, the inter-client synchronization with respect to the target presentation time is smoothly achieved. Furthermore, RTCP-compatible signaling between the server and group-clients is performed to achieve the inter-client synchronization and error recovery, where the exchange of controlling message is restricted. Simulation results show the performance of the proposed multicast media streaming framework.

As the Internet proliferates, there has been a growing interest in supporting multiparty collaborative applications. It has led to the emergence of many-to-ma ny reliable multicast. Congestion control is a key task in reliable multicast along with error control. However, existing tree-based congestion control schemes such as TRAMCC and MTCP are designed for one-to-many reliable multicast and have some drawbacks when they are used for many-to-many reliable multicast. We propose an efficient congestion control mechanism, MTRMCC, for tree-based many-to-many reliable multicast protocols. The proposed scheme is based on the congestion windowing mechanism and a rate controller is used in addition. The feedback for error recovery is exploited for congestion control as well to minimize the overhead at the receivers. The ACK timer and the NACK timers are set dynamically reflecting the network traffic changes. The rate regulation algorithm in the proposed scheme is designed to help the flows sharing the same link to achieve the fair share quickly. The performance of the proposed scheme is evaluated using network simulator ns-2. The simulation results show that the proposed scheme outperforms TRAMCC in terms of intra-session fairness and supports responsiveness, TCP-friendliness, and scalability.

A variety of real-time multicast applications such as video conferences, remote lectures, and video-on-demand have become in commonplace with the expansion of broadband Internet services. Due to nontrivial problems in the IP multicast technology, the peer-to-peer multicast technology (P2P-multicast) has emerged as a practical implementation, although its network resource utilization is less efficient. A multihome network has the potential of alleviating this inefficiency by providing flexibility in communication path selections for each host with multiple gateways to the Internet. This paper has first formulated the P2P-multicast routing problem in the multihome network, and has proved the NP-completeness of its decision problem. Then, a two-stage heuristic algorithm called P2PMM_router has been presented for this P2P Multicast Multihome-network routing problem. The first stage constructs an initial multicast routing tree from an optimum spanning tree by Prim algorithm, through satisfying the constraints. The second stage improves the tree by repeating partial modifications and constraint satisfactions. The extensive simulation results using random network instances support the effectiveness of our P2PMM_router.

IP multicast is seen as an efficient way of encouraging multimedia services such as Internet TV and Videoconferencing because it can deliver packets to multiple users while efficiently using network resources. Source Specific Multicast (SSM) is suggested as the IP multicast routing protocol and it can construct multicast trees efficiently. However it increases multicast forwarding table entries and fails to handle source mobility. This paper proposes the Unicast Extension Multicast Protocol (UMP) to solve these problems. In the protocol, only the routers that act as branching points keep multicast forwarding table entries, and packets are delivered between these routers using IP unicast. This prevents the multicast forwarding table entries from burdening other non-branch routers. Additionally, UMP supports source mobility by using the recursive join messages to prevent the creation of redundant paths while supporting source mobility.

To overcome inefficiencies on tree-based and mesh-based scheme, overlay multicast scheme for MANET has been recently proposed to provide higher packet delivery ratio than the former as well as more efficient resource usage than the latter. However, previous all overlay multicast schemes are not designed with any considerations for dense/sparse environments resulted from unlimited movement of mobile nodes. For this reason, all packets should be transmitted in the form of unicast packet so they cannot fully make use of node's broadcast capability even though some group members are densely distributed within single-hop on the same shared media. Due to above reason, this causes extra forwarding overhead, low resource utilization as well as high packet collision. In this paper, we propose a novel hybrid overlay multicast scheme, EAOM (Environment-Aware Overlay Multicast), which uses neighboring group members' information to deliver packet with low cost. In EAOM, a group member has two modes depending on the number of neighboring group members. Under dense environment, host group model in wired network is applied. While in sparse environment, packets are delivered to each receiver along overlay DDT (Data Delivery Tree) as same as previous overlay multicast schemes. Hence, EAOM can not only remove mentioned obstacles in dense environment, but also cope with network mobility very well in sparse environment. Using simulation results, we demonstrate that EAOM has good packet delivery ratio, low control overhead as well as short end-to-end delay.

IP multicast is an efficient means of sending to a group, but the packets are sent unreliably. Mobility complicates the problem because many multicast protocols are inefficient when faced with frequent membership or location change. In this paper, we propose a new protocol to additionally achieve fault recovery of multicast applications in IP internetwork with mobile participants. Unlike many studies which use the basic unicast routing capability of Mobile IP as the foundation, our protocol is built on top of the existing static hosts IP unicast and multicast forwarding services to avoid triangle routing which always occurs in Mobile IP. Relying only on the existing multicast service model and reconstructing the delivery tree every time a multicast member and/or source move is not always a good solution. By applying the ideas of bi-directional tunneled multicast, our protocol attempts to hide host mobility from all other members of the group. Therefore, the multicast distribution tree will not be updated for the sake of member location change. Furthermore, our protocol has near shortest delivery paths like remote subscription protocol. Exploiting the randomized forwarding service called randomcast in the repair process for packet losses, our protocol achieves local recovery and improves robustness. Additionally, our system structure can minimize the request implosion and duplicate replies. Simulation results show that our protocol has the distinct performance advantages in local recovery and robustness by using randomcast. Our protocol can also adapt to the fluctuation of both host movement and the number of mobile members (i.e., having mobility and scalability properties).

The multimedia applications have recently generated much interest in wireless network infrastructure with supporting the quality-of-service (QoS) communications. In this paper, we propose a lantern-tree-based QoS on-demand multicast protocol for wireless ad hoc networks. Our proposed scheme offers a bandwidth routing protocol for QoS support in a multihop mobile network, where the MAC sub-layer adopts the CDMA-over-TDMA channel model. The QoS on-demand multicast protocol determines the end-to-end bandwidth calculation and bandwidth allocation from a source to a group of destinations. In this paper, we identify a lantern-tree for developing the QoS multicast protocol to satisfy certain bandwidth requirement, while the lantern-tree is served as the multicast-tree. Our lantern-tree-based scheme offers a higher success rate to construct the QoS multicast tree due to using the lantern-tree. The lantern-tree is a tree whose sub-path is constituted by the lantern-path, where the lantern-path is a kind of multi-path structure. This obviously improves the success rate by means of multi-path routing. In particular, our proposed scheme can be easily applied to most existing on-demand multicast protocols. Performance analysis results demonstrate the achievements of our proposed protocol.

We propose a new protocol to achieve fault recovery of multicast applications in IP internetwork with mobile participators. Our protocol uses the basic unicast routing capability of IETF Mobile IP as the foundation, and leverages existing IP multicast models to provide reliable multicast services for mobile hosts as well. We believe that the resulting scheme is simple, scalable, transparent, and independent of the underlying multicast routing facility. A key feature of our protocol is the use of multicast forwarding agent (MFA) to address the scalability and reliability issues in the reliable mobile multicast applications. Our simulation results show the distinct performance advantages of our protocol using MFAs over two other approaches proposed for the mobile multicast service, namely Mobile Multicast Protocol (MoM) and bi-directional tunneling, particularly as the number of mobile group members and home agents (HAs) increases.

There is an increasing demand for the technology of content distribution, by which each user can request desired content through a network. Because of the low efficiency of existing systems, we proposed a new block transfer type video distribution system called Burst VoD. The Burst VoD system aggressively utilizes multicasting, and divides the content data into a mass of block files, which it periodically transmits to a terminal through a high-speed network, using a higher rate than the playback speed. However, by using the scheduling algorithm of the Burst VoD system, when users request the same content from different periods, the VoD server repeatedly transmits the same block files in different periods. In this paper, we propose an advanced scheduling algorithm based on the Burst VoD system to improve its multicasting efficiency. In addition, we propose a multi-channel BurstVoD in order to reduce the interface bandwidth of client.

This paper investigates modified random timers based on uniform and exponentially distributed timers for feedback scalability for large groups. We observe the widely-used probability distribution functions and propose new ones that are aware of network delays. The awareness of network delays of our proposed modified p.d.fs proves to be able to achieve lower expected number of messages compared to the original ones given that the parameters are optimized for the network variables: the number of receivers, and the network delay. In our analysis we derive an equation to estimate the optimized parameter based on these network variables. We also simulate the p.d.fs for heterogenous network delays and find that each receiver only needs to be aware of its network delay.