Gateway designs for internetwork multicast communication

Abstract

The increasing availability of low cost local area networks and distributed operating systems has resulted in the development of protocols which support one-to-many, or multicast communication. Many of the issues relating to multicast communication on a single network are fairly well understood — as illustrated by the growing number of applications that take advantage of multicast communication. However, internetwork multicast communication can lead to problems not normally encountered in intranetwork multicast communication, such as gateway identification and remote destination identification. These and other problems in the design of gateways for multicast communication are considered. In addition, it is shown how a hybrid gateway can overcome a number of limitations imposed by internetwork multicast communication.