IP Multicast via Satellite: A Survey

Many of the emerging applications in the Internet, such as tele-conferencing, distance-learning, distributed games, software updates, and distributed computing would benefit from multicast services. In many of these applications, there is a need to distribute information to many sites that are widely dispersed from each other. Communication satellites are a natural technology option and are extremely well suited for carrying such services. Despite the potential of satellite multicast, there exists little support for satellite IP multicast services. Both Internet Engineering and Internet Research Task Forces (IETF and IRTF) have been involved in a research effort to identify the design space for a general purpose reliable multicast protocol and standardize certain protocol components as building blocks. However, for satellite multicast services, several of these components have a different design space. In this paper, we attempt to provide an overview of the design space and the ways in which the network deployment and application requirements affect the solution space. We maintain a similar taxonomy to that of the IETF efforts, and identify which key components of a general multicast protocol are affected by two of the most common satellite network deployment scenarios. We also highlight some of the issues which we think are critical in the development of next generation satellite IP multicast services.