Supporting Multicast Management Using the Multicast Reachability Monitor (MRM) Protocol

Network management for multicast traac has become a key to the continued deployment of multicast in the Internet. The lack of usable management tools is believed to be one of the barriers to any substantial use of multicast in production Internet services. Because multicast is a relatively new service, management tools either do not exist; do not provide the right functions; or are too hard to use. As a result, there is a real need to develop new multicast management solutions. In this paper we propose a new protocol that provides mechanisms to actively manage and monitor multicast reachability and path quality. Our proposed protocol, called the Multi-cast Reachability Monitor (MRM), can be used to send, receive, and collect statistics about a multicast stream. This information can then be presented using novel visualization techniques. The ultimate goal is to identify problems before they happen, as they are happening, and/or to assist in troubleshooting eeorts. From this perspective, MRM is designed to be used as a building block for an integrated multicast network management tool set. In describing MRM, we start by deening some important characteristics of a multicast management system. We also describe the MRM protocol components. After discussing likely management scenarios, we nish by describing the state of the MRM protocol and compare it to other available network management platforms.