Small group multicast: a new solution for multicasting on the Internet

The Internet's global ubiquity has fostered numerous applications that use many different communications models. Applications like FTP Web browsing, and e-mail employ a unicast model where two parties exchange data over logical point-to-point connections. In other applications, such as multiparty audio/video conferencing and collaborative gaming, a source sends data to multiple parties. One way to support multiparty communications is with unicast connections between the source and all of the receivers. If a group has N parties, then a source must set up N-1 unicast connections and transmit the data N times over the network. When N is large, scalability becomes an issue for the source and the network. IP multicast solves this problem by sending a single copy of the data over a distribution tree that is rooted at the source and that branches out to the various destinations. Because the source transmits a single copy of the data, only one copy of the data appears on the branches in the distribution tree.