A Novel Approach for Transparent Bandwidth Conservation

In this paper, we present a novel approach, stealth multicast, which offers a practical solution for the adoption of network-level IP multicast. Rather than focusing on a global scale such as with previous approaches, stealth multicast optimizes efficiency on a domain-wise scale. In short, stealth multicast dynamically combines redundant data payloads into virtual groups for multicast transmission across the domain. At the edge of the domain, the packets are converted back to unicast, thus keeping stealth multicast true to its namesake in that neither the user applications nor the external domain are aware of the presence of multicast. We present simulation studies to show the potential of stealth multicast.