The Evolution of Multicast From the MBone to Inter Domain Multicast to Internet Deployment

Without a doubt multicast communication the one to many or many to many delivery of data has become a hot topic It is of interest in the research community among standards groups and to network service providers For all the attention multicast has received there are still issues that have not been completely resolved One result is that protocols are still evolving and some standards are not yet nished From a deployment perspective the lack of standards has slowed progress but e orts to deploy multicast as an experimental service are in fact gaining momentum The question now is how long it will be before multicast becomes a true Internet service The goal of this paper is to describe the past present and future of multicast Starting with the Multicast Backbone MBone we describe how the emphasis has been on developing and re ning intra domain multicast routing protocols Starting in the middle to late s particular emphasis has been placed on developing inter domain multicast routing protocols We provide a functional overview of the currently deployed solution The future of multicast may hinge on several research e orts that are working to make the provision of multicast less complex by fundamentally changing the multicast model We brie y survey these e orts Finally attempts are being made to deploy native multicast routing in both Internet networks and the commodity Internet We examine how multicast is being deployed in these networks