Design and implementation of QoS measurement and network diagnosing framework for IP multicast in advanced collaborative environment

The access grid for collaborative environment exploits IP multicast. Although the IP multicast is quite a promising technology, it faces lots of challenges such as unreliable data transport and unstable network infrastructure. As a first step to achieve reliability and stability in IP multicast, it is essential to monitor and debug multicast networks. In this paper we introduce MMag, a user-oriented multicast monitoring tool for the access grid. The MMag provides both application and network level monitoring facilities to assess delivery statistics and to diagnose multicast problems. The implementation has been tested and will support access grid operators with a simple yet extensive view of multicast performance.