Global Address Allocation for Wide Area IP-Multicasting

The IP-multicast transmission is the IP level answer for the growing one-to-many content spreading needs in multimedia applications (Hosszú, 2005). Nevertheless the address allocation and service discovery is a problematic field of this technology. Despite of the efficiency of the IP-multicast it has not been deployed in the whole Internet. Especially the global address allocation is a problematic part of the Internet-wide multicasting. This article addresses such problems in order to review the existing methods and the emerging research results. The IP-multicasting uses a shared IPv4 address range. In Internet-wide applications the dynamic allocation and reuse of the addresses is essential. Recent Internet-wide IP-multicasting protocols (MBGP/ MSDP/PIM-SM) have a scalability or complexity problem. The article introduces the existing solution for the wide-area multicasting and also proposes a novel method, which overcomes the limitations of the previous approaches.