Multicast Communication for Video Broadcasting Service over IPv4 Network Using IP Option

In this paper, we propose a protocol for multicast communication called Multicast Datagram Transfer Protocol (MDTP) to provide multicast for video broadcasting service on the Internet. MDTP is a oneto-many multicast communication protocol, which is constructed based on IPv4 unicast protocol by utilizing IP Router Alert Option, and it uses unicast addressing and unicast routing protocol. A mechanism is presented to allow a router to remove identical video stream, to duplicate a video stream, and to forward each copy of the duplicated video stream to its destinations. Ordinary IP routers that do not support MDTP will treat the MDTP packets as normal unicast packets. Hence, gradual deployment is possible without tunneling technique. With a delegation mechanism, MDTP router is also able to handle request from clients, and serve the requested video stream. The simulation results show that the average bandwidth usage of MDTP is close to the average bandwidth usage of IP multicast. MDTP also has greater efficiency than XCAST, and its efficiency becomes significant for a large number of clients. key words: multicast communication, video broadcasting, IP Router Alert Option, Internet protocol