A Distributed Approach for Monitoring Multicast Service Availability
K. Sarac
Department of Computer Science,
Univ. Texas at Dallas
Richardson, TX 75083 USA
Email: ksarac_AT_utdallas.edu
K. Almeroth
Department of Computer Science,
Univ. California Santa Barbara
Santa Barbara, CA 93106 USA
Email: almeroth_AT_cs.ucsb.edu
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. One of the most important management tasks for multicast is to verify the availability of the service to its users. This task is usually referred to as reachability monitoring. Reachability monitoring requires a number of monitoring stations to work together to collect this information in a distributed manner in the inter-domain scale.
In this paper we present 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. Using simulations, we compare a number of alternative approaches for feedback collection and make suggestions on when to use each. We believe our work provides insight into the issues and considerations in designing and developing multicast reachability monitoring systems.
Keywords: multicast, multicast management, multicast reachability monitoring, distributed monitoring
JNSM: Vol. 12, No. 3, 2004
A Distributed Approach for Monitoring Multicast Service Availability [Vol. 12, No. 3, 2004]
NOTE: only abstract of paper available on-line; please contact your library or the authors for the full paper
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