Providing Scalable Many-to-One Feedback in Multicast Reachability Monitoring Systems

With the deployment of native multicast in commercial networks, multicast is getting closer to becoming a ubiquitous service in the Internet. The success of this deployment largely depends on the availability of goodmanagemen t tools and systems. In this paper, we focus on reachability monitoring as an important multicast management task. First, we provide a general architecture for multicast reachability monitoring systems and focus on three critical functions: agent configuration, monitoring and feedback collection. For each component, we provide a number of alternative approaches to implement the requiredfunctionality and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we focus on the feedback collection component. To a large extent, it determines the complexity and the overheadof a monitoring system. We compare a number of alternative approaches for feedback collection using simulations andmak e suggestions on when to use each. We expect our work to provide insight into the issues and considerations in designing and developing multicast reachability monitoring systems.