Relayed multicast protocol for 1-to-many group communications

IP multicast shows very strong advantage in the group communication services. But to deploy IP multicast in the current Internet, every IP routers must be changed into multicast enabled ones and several deployment issues should be solved. So theses problems prevent IP multicast mechanism from being deployed in IP world. And these problems give a good reason why today's group communication uses replicated IP unicast mechanism instead of IP multicast. Recently an overlay multicast is proposed as an alternative method of IP multicast. We propose a framework as an application-layer way to provide end-to-end multicast services over IP-network environment. In this paper we define the basic concepts of relayed multicast scheme, data delivery models, service scenarios and some test issues of RMCP as well as implementation and test on APAN