Monitoring IP multicast in the internet: recent advances and ongoing challenges

Multicast was one of the first "value-added" services to be developed and deployed in the Internet. In evaluating the success of multicast, if ubiquitous deployment has been the goal, multicast has not been successful. However, if widespread use of multicast as a bandwidth-saving technique has been the goal, multicast has indeed been successful. Upon closer investigation, one of the reasons for only partial success is a lack of support for service management. Multicast is particularly hard to manage interdomain where it has been less successful, but easier to manage within a domain where network administrators have more control and smaller networks to manage. In this article we survey some of the recent service management efforts, efforts that have been successful intradomain, but fall short for interdomain. In particular, we focus on important topics like monitoring multicast reachability between sources and receivers; understanding the different challenges and solutions between inter- and intradomain service management; and surveying existing solutions to determine whether multicast capability exists on an end-to-end path. Our investigation shows that while not much attention was initially given to multicast service management, more recent efforts have been successful at developing good solutions and tools.