Stealth Multicasting: A Catalyst for Multicast Deployment

This paper addresses the issue of ISP motivation for multicast deployment. Our work is motivated by unicast applications such as on-line gaming and multimedia streaming that cannot leverage an existing multicast infrastructure and thus manage data distribution to multiple interested clients themselves. While such applications would greatly benefit from a multicast infrastructure, there is questionable economic benefit to an ISP for deploying multicast. In this paper, we propose a unique concept entitled stealth multicasting that allows an ISP to be the sole beneficiary of multicasting without awareness or modifications by the global Internet or end users. In the stealth multicast model, candidate packets are dynamically consolidated into virtual groups and transported across the initial ISP domain via multicast. Before leaving the domain, multicast packets are converted back to unicast, thus hiding the existence of multicast and avoiding modifications to end-user applications. We believe that such a scheme can indirectly accelerate multicast deployment for end users. In our paper, we show that the stealth multicast model can offer significant benefits to not only the ISP but also that our model allows for an economically viable transition to global multicast availability.