MPEMM: Multi-perspective performance evaluation model for multicast

With the ever increasing demand of multimedia traffic on the Internet, the interest in deploying multicast for distribution of these contents have increased. One hurdle however in this regard is quantifying the multicast protocol performance. Many efforts have been put into defining multicast metrics for evaluating protocol performance. In this paper we define a metric which will provide a reasonable measure of protocol's efficiency. The metric is developed keeping two perspectives in mind. First, how efficient a multicast protocol is in utilizing network resources and second, the quality of service it can provide to an end user. Lastly we discuss some issues related with quantizing multicast traffic using the proposed metric.