Multicast Session Management and QoS Management for Multicast Group Communications

Conventional multicast group communications need a dynamic mechanism for group management according to the join/leave of receivers and for the modification of membership information and a QoS management for a reliable multicast group communication. The Group Management Protocol (GMP) is an application-layer control protocol to supports the group management and the membership management for the multicast group communications but GMP does not support the QoS management. Also, RSVP supports the QoS for a reliable multicast group communication but RSVP is limited for managing the group membership. Therefore, we need to manage the group membership together with the QoS for the multicast group communications. In this paper, we propose a reliable multicast session management protocol called Multicast Session Management Protocol (MSMP). MSMP should coordinate the group management and the QoS management. MSMP is an application layer control protocol for managing QoS. MSMP consists of a session management function and a QoS management function.