Consideration of Receiver Interest for IP Multicast Delivery

Large-scale applications are characterized by a large number of dynamic and often interactive group members. The nature of these applications is such that participants are not interested in all the content transmitted. We examine two currently available techniques to scope delivery of content to interested receivers in IP multicast: filtering (data is filtered by middleware before passed to the application) and addressing (data is routed only to those receivers that express their interest). We propose a framework that models large-scale application behavior. We use this framework to evaluate the performance of these applications (and related protocols) when the network is capable of filtering or addressing. Our results show that the current Internet architecture does not efficiently support large-scale applications because it can not efficiently manage multiple multicast groups. We show that addressing is preferred to filtering given that groups are easy to create and manage. We highli..