A case for end system multicast

The conventional wisdom has been that Internet protocol (IP) is the natural protocol layer for implementing multicast related functionality. However, more than a decade after its initial proposal, IP multicast is still plagued with concerns pertaining to scalability, network management, deployment, and support for higher layer functionality such as error, flow, and congestion control. We explore an alternative architecture that we term end system multicast, where end systems implement all multicast related functionality including membership management and packet replication. This shifting of multicast support from routers to end systems has the potential to address most problems associated with IP multicast.…