Performance evaluation of multicast protocols for multimedia traffic

With the ever increasing demand of multimedia traffic on the internet the interest in deploying multicast has increased. One hurdle in this regard is quantifying the multicast protocol performance. Many efforts have been put into defining multicast metrics for evaluating protocol performance. In this paper we identified metrics that will provide reasonable measure of protocol's efficiency. The metric is developed keeping two perspectives in mind. First, how efficient a multicast protocol is in utilizing network resources and second, the quality of service it can provide to the end user. A simulation was done using ns-2 to evaluate the performance of multicast protocols based on the metrics we identified. The overall performance of each protocol is calculated and relative efficiency of each protocol is established based on our metrics.