Design and Implementation of Group Management Protocol for Multicast Communication

Abstract

A multicast communication requires a dynamic membership management function since the membership information changes as the receivers join or leave. Though some protocols include a ‘loosely-coupled’ mechanism, most conventional multicast transport protocols do not have a ‘strictly-coupled’ mechanism for group management. One of the main reasons may be that the conventional transport protocols like TCP or UDP are not suitable, yet. However, recently a new enhanced transport protocols are proposed and implemented in ITU-T SG 17 and ISO/IEC JTC1 SC6. Therefore it is reasonable for us to assume that soon or later a new protocol such as Enhanced Communications Transport Protocol (ECTP) will be available in the market. In this paper, under this assumption, we designed and implemented the membership management function to support desirable management of multicast members.