Experience with a QoS-providing multicast management system

This paper presents the implementation details and experiment results of the IPME QoS network management system which is specifically designed to accommodate time-critical multimedia applications in multicast network environments. As the multimedia and computer communication techniques develop rapidly, there has been growing research interest in effective management of multicast services. When applying a multicast network to multimedia applications, an efficient handling of time-critical media and network resources becomes crucial to the success of multicast services since the underlying communication structure may get complicated. Managing a multimedia communication system generally requires a sophisticated model which accommodates many techniques on efficient media transport, adequate QoS provision and effective network management. In order to provide QoS for multimedia applications in a multicast network environment, in particular, we believe that it is important to establish a QoS-oriented network management model which should specifically be designed for multicast networks. Although the necessity of such a model has been acknowledged for some time, there has been little research effort to integrate multimedia QoS from the aspect of multicast network management.