Supporting multicast deployment efforts: a survey of tools for multicast monitoring

As the Internet is expected to better support multimedia applications, new services will need to be deployed. An example of one of these next-generation services is multicast communication, the one-to-many delivery of data. Over the last ten years, multicast research as well as deployment efforts have both been major areas of interest. In order to bridge the gap between the initial deployment experiments and the availability of multicast as a robust network service, there needs to be a full complement of multicast monitoring tools. In this paper we first survey the debugging, modeling, and management tools that have evolved along side the Internet's multicast infrastructure. Through this survey, we have observed important generalizations in three areas: (1) the challenges unique to monitoring multicast, (2) a methodology common to many multicast monitoring tools/systems, and (3) a set of considerations important to the development of new tools/systems. Using these generalizations we present two of our efforts to evaluate multicast reachability in the Internet. We also use these generalizations to evaluate some of the more recent efforts to develop large-scale management platforms.

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