Multicast Communication: Protocols, Programming, and Applications

"This book introduces the fundamental concepts behind multicast and will bring you up-to-date on the status of multicast in the Internet--giving you the knowledge you need for the next generation of applications that will efficiently transmit large amounts of multimedia data to large groups of users. This is highly recommended reading for anyone who has been looking for a technically precise, yet easy-to-understand book on multicast communication."

Dr. Wolfgang Effelsberg
University of Mannheim, Germany

The Internet is quickly becoming the backbone for the worldwide information society of the future. Point-to-point communication dominates the network today, however, group communication--using multicast technology--will rapidly gain importance as digital, audio, and video transmission, push technology for the Web, and distribution of software updates to millions of end users become ubiquitous.

Multicast Communication: Protocols and Applications explains how and why multicast technology is the key to this transition. This book provides network engineers, designers, and administrators with the underlying concepts as well as a complete and detailed description of the protocols and algorithms that comprise multicast.

Features:

• Presents information on the entire range of multicast protocols, including, PIM-SM, MFTP, and PGM and explains their mechanisms, trade-offs, and solid approaches to their implementation
• Provides an in-depth examination of Quality of Service concepts, including: RSVP, ST2, IntServ, and DiffServ
• Discusses group address allocation and scoping
• Discusses multicast implementation in ATM networks
• Builds a solid understanding of the Mbone and surveys the successes and current limitations of real multicast applications on the Internet such as videoconferencing, whiteboards, and distance learning

Authors:

Ralph Wittmann is in the research group for High Performance Networking and Multimedia Systems at the Technical University of Braunschweig. His research interests are mainly concerned with multicast and multimedia communications in heterogeneous environments.

Martina Zitterbart is full professor in computer science at the Technical University of Braunschweig, Germany. Her primary research interests are in multimedia communication systems, internetworking and conferencing applications.

Table of Contents:

1. Introduction
2.The Basics of Group Communication
3. Multicast Routing
4. Quality of Service
5. Multicast in ATM Networks
6. Transport Protocols
7. MBone--the Multicast Backbone of the Internet
8. Outlook

Related Titles:

Computer & Communication Networks
Information Technology