A Novel Architecture for Secure and Scalable Multicast over IP Network

Currently, multicast services can be implemented at the IP layer or the application layer. While IP multicast violates the stateless paradigm of Internet and incurs great difficulties to congestion and flow control, application-layer multicast is lack of scalability due to the unreliability and resource constraints of end-hosts. Moreover, security is a main weakness in Internet-wide group communications. We propose in this paper a novel architecture for secure and scalable multicast in the Internet. In our architecture, a Multicast Agent in each Autonomous System (AS) is responsible for delivering multicast packets at the ASlevel, relaying packets to end-hosts, and generating and updating keys to secure group communications. The proposed membership management protocol enables no-delay to membership updating; the proposed inter-domain routing protocol reduces the worst-case link stress by one magnitude compared to state-of-the-art protocols, and bounds the extra bandwidth cost within one percent compared to traditional IP multicast.