MHealth: A Real-Time Graphical Multicast Monitoring Tool

MHealth: A Real-Time Graphical Multicast Monitoring Tool by David B. Makofske The exponential growth of the Internet combined with the increasing popularity of streaming audio and video content are pushing Internet bandwidth constraints to their limits. Methods of managing and more e ciently utilizing the existing bandwidth are becoming increasingly vital. Multicasting Internet content, especially streaming audio and video, can provide enormous bandwidth savings. A decade of e orts at deploying multicast combined with the rising need for better tra c management for bandwidth-hungry audio and video applications has led to signi cant momentum for multicast implementation. One of the remaining barriers to widespread adoption of multicast in the Internet is the lack of multicast monitoring and debugging tools. To address this need this thesis introduces MHealth, a graphical, near real-time multicast monitoring tool. MHealth utilizes existing tools to collect comprehensive data about Real-Time Protocol (RTP) based streaming audio/video sessions. By using a combination of application-level protocol data for participant information and a multicast route tracing tool for topology information, MHealth is able to present a multicast tree's topology and information about the quality of received data. MHealth is also a logging tool that can be used for post-session data analysis and network fault detection. iv