QoS Path Monitoring for Multicast Networks

Abstract

New network monitoring tools are necessary for supporting the deployment and the operations of multicast services on the Internet. Because of the peculiar characteristics of multicast routing (e.g., multicast forwarding trees) and the potential of message implosion problems, traditional network management tools are not sufficient for monitoring the quality of multicast delivery such as packet loss, delay, and jitter. Current multicast monitoring tools are either not scalable, limited in their functionality, or difficult to deploy in enterprise networks. In this paper, we present a new monitoring framework (called SMRM, SNMP-based multicast reachability monitoring) for multicast reachability based on SNMP. The SMRM framework is used for actively monitoring the health and the quality of service of multicast networks. SMRM provides a scalable real-time feedback on the packet loss, delay, and jitter of any selected segments of multicast delivery trees. In addition, NOC (network operations center) personnel can easily understand, deploy, and extend the SMRM framework in order to detect and isolate reachability and performance problems in multicast sessions. SMRM combines both distributed monitoring and centralized control, which offers scalability and simplicity. The integration of SMRM into SNMP is motivated by the wide distribution of SNMP agents in networks today, which significantly facilitates the deployment of SMRM is existing networks.