A direct ATM multicast service with quality-of-service guarantees

Multicast has been well tested on non-ATM networks and proven to be a highly effective mode of network service especially in the area of real-time distributed multimedia applications. Although multicast is also supported in ATM, so far the signalling facilities provided have been rudimentary at best. This has prevented multicasting to be exploited effectively in ATM networks. In this paper, a new scheme in providing ATM based multicast service is described. The proposed scheme does not only provide many-to-many ATM virtual circuit-level multicast, it also supports dynamic Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees with heterogeneous receivers similar to those being proposed by the Internet Protocol (IP). One of the major emphases of the design is to provide a transparent set of common network services for applications to operate across both the proposed VC-based and IP multicast services on the same ATM networks. This is achieved in part by adopting the same Internet resource reservation protocol for the proposed ATM multicast service. In this paper, the various components of the multicast service such as multicast routing, QoS negotiation and connection management are presented in detail. Initial experience with a prototype implementation is also discussed.