Providing Scalable Many-to-One Feedback in Multicast Reachability Monitoring SystemsKamil Saraç and Kevin C. Almeroth Department of Computer Science Abstract. 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 good management 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 required functionality and discuss their advantages and disadvantages. Then, we focus on the feedback collection component. To a large extent, it determines the complexity and the overhead of a monitoring system. We compare a number of alternative approaches for feedback collection using simulations and make 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. LNCS 2216, p. 256 ff. Online publication: October 10, 2001 |