An Integrated Two-Tier Multicast-Agent Architecture for All-IP Multicast Transport Services

Current group communication applications need to overcome inter-domain and heterogeneous multicast transport challenges. All-IP multicast over Internet is proposed to achieve the efficiency and transparency on IP multicast packet delivery not only for native IP multicast domains, but also for non-IP multicast supported domains. To guarantee the efficient IP multicast packet delivery over heterogeneous networks, therefore application level multicast (ALM) and overlay multicast (OM) were introduced for the connectivity of inter-domain coordination and local heterogeneous access. In this paper, we propose two-tier multicast agent (MA) mechanism to integrate ALM with overlay tunnel connections to inter-domain multicast and network level connections to local heterogeneous multicast access. In our experimental results, the proposed MA mechanism can achieve all-IP multicast transport services with multicast packet transmission over inter-domain and heterogeneous local wired/wireless access networks.