(Deployable) reduction of multicast state with in-packet bloom filters

Recent developments in networking technology have enabled massive media distribution in the Internet. However, bandwidth is still a limited resource and unicast-based media distribution from a single source to multiple receivers is inefficient. Multicasting provides traffic replication closer to the receivers allowing more efficient data distribution. IP multicast can be used for distributing data streams in IP networks, but the bandwidth saving comes at the cost of increased state in the network routers. The amount of state is directly dependent on the number of multicast groups in use. In this paper, we show how in-packet Bloom filter (iBF) multicast can be used to reduce multicast state in the network. The deployment can be done gradually: during the migration phase, a single AS can replace IP multicast with the proposed iBF-based solution without affecting the rest of the network, and take advantage of the reduced state in its core routers.