A performance analyzer for multicast traffic behavior analysis based on observing PIM-SM messages
Seiji Ueno, Toshihiko Kato, Shuichi Itoh · Electronics and Communications in Japan (Part II Electronics) · 2005
On the Internet, the prevalent communication style in recent years has been to distribute voice and video information simultaneously to large numbers of receivers by IP multicasting. With the use of broadband Internet, it is likely that a still larger amount of multicast traffic will be transmitted. Thus, monitoring techniques that allow measurement of traffic levels and communications quality for multicast traffic will become important. However, the performance evaluation tools for the multicast traffic hitherto proposed have only the function of acquiring the transmitted datagram traffic, and cannot provide detailed analyses such as the reasons for the generation or termination of datagram transmission. In order to provide a detailed analysis of multicast traffic transmission, it is necessary to analyze the multicast routing protocol for transmission control of the traffic. This study focuses on PIM-SM (protocol-independent multicast-sparse model) multicast routing protocol and establishes the correspondence between PIM-SM messages exchanged between routers and the transmitted multicast traffic. The design and implementation of an analyzer which provides detailed performance evaluation of multicast communications, and the results of multicast analysis using the proposed analyzer, are described. © 2005 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 2, 88(8): 19–29, 2005; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecjb.20198