Functional and performance comparison of open-source and commercial multicast solutions

In this paper we give an overview of open-source and commercial multicast routing solutions. XORP (eXtensible Open Router Platform) is the only system which includes support for the multicast management and multicast routing protocol. We provided support for the multicast routing and multicast routing protocol (PIM sparse mode) in the core of the Linux operating system and developed an advanced open-source compatible interface between the PIM sparse mode for the internet protocol version 6 in kernel and XORP system. We performed tree performance tests to show a comparison between the XORP and the commercial routing Cisco 2811 ISR device. Our test results show that the XORP system achieves better performance results in case of multicast functionality compared to Cisco. Our results also show direct comparison between the internet protocol versions 4 and 6, slightly deviating from each other thus demonstrating maturity of multicast technology transition to the newer protocol IPv6.