An overview of multicast routing techniques for group communications applications

Forming a group communication, IPTV contents are delivered to the subscribers using multicast techniques. Without decreasing the Quality of Service (QoS), multimedia contents are distributed in a most effective way to the clients subscribed to this service. Several solutions are existed for routing the packet in this application whether using the network layer, application layer, or even combining several solutions, including peer-to-peer (P2P). An overview of several multicast techniques are presented in this paper, as well as discussion on the challenges and issues on delivering multimedia contents on IPTV services.