GTrace: Simple mechanisms for monitoring of multicast sessions

Abstract

For multicast to be a viable as a dependable network service, mechanisms for monitoring and managing multicast flows must be developed. Significant prior work exists to use receiver observations to derive properties of multicast groups, including the underlying distribution topology and membership size. However, just as multicast is delegation of replication and distribution from the sender into the network, we contend that similar delegation of monitoring and management into the network is warranted and beneficial. gTrace is a set of mechanisms to monitor multicast distribution trees that operates on routers participating in the multicast distribution to obtain accurate observations throughout the tree in a scalable manner. In this paper we present the protocol and validate its benefits through analysis, simulation and experimentation. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.