Used to direct forwarding by matching destination addresses to the network paths used to reach them. The construction of routing tables is the primary goal of routing protocols.
Published in Chapter:
Optimizing Inter-Domain Internet Multicast
Huaqun Guo (Institute for Infocomm Research and National University of Singapore, Singapore), Lek-Heng Ngoh (Institute for Infocomm Research, A*STAR, Singapore), and Wai-Choong Wong (National University of Singapore, Singapore)
Copyright: © 2008
|Pages: 7
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-59140-993-9.ch055
Abstract
In the age of multimedia and high-speed networks, there are many applications that involve sending information to a selective, usually large, number of clients. Common examples of such applications include audio/video conferencing, distance learning, video-on-demand, distributed interactive games, data distribution, service location/discovery, collaborative computing, collaborative visualization, distributed simulation, communicating to dynamic group, and so on. To support such applications, multicast is considered a very efficient mechanism (Lao 2005) since it uses some delivery structures to forward data from senders to receivers, with the aim that the overall utilization of resources in the underlying network is minimized in some sense (Oliveira 2005). For example, multicast is heavily used for mass media TV distribution which can be seen from a survey conducted by NAB Research and Planning (NAB 2005). NAB Research and Planning conducted this survey in July 2005 of all U.S. full-power commercial television stations on their plans for DTV (Digital TV) multicast services. Among the 450 response stations, 50% of stations are currently multicasting, and 79% among non-multicasting stations are considering multicasting at some point in the future.