Real-time multicast tree visualization and monitoring

Abstract

The exponential growth of the Internet combined with the increasing popularity of streaming audio and video are pushing Internet bandwidth constraints to their limits. Methods of managing and more efficiently utilizing existing bandwidth are becoming increasingly vital. Using IP multicast to deliver content, especially streaming audio and video, can provide enormous bandwidth savings. A decade of effort at deploying multicast, combined with the rising need for better traffic management for bandwidth-hungry applications has led to significant momentum for multicast use and deployment. One of the remaining barriers to widespread adoption is the lack of multicast monitoring and debugging tools. To address this need we introduce MHealth, a graphical, near real-time multicast monitoring tool. MHealth utilizes existing tools to collect comprehensive data about Realtime Transport Protocol (RTP) based streaming audio/video sessions. By using a combination of application-level protocol data for participant information and a multicast route tracing tool for topology information, MHealth is able to present a multicast tree's topology and information about the quality of received data. In this paper we describe the design and implementation of MHealth and include an example analysis of multicast tree statistics. Copyright © 2000 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.