Supporting Multicast Management Using the Multicast Reachability Monitor (MRM) Protocol

Network management for multicast traffic has become a key to thecontinued deployment of multicast in the Internet. The lack ofusable management tools is believed to be one of the barriers toany substantial use of multicast in production Internet services.Because multicast is a relatively new service, management toolseither do not exist; do not provide the right functions; or aretoo hard to use. As a result, there is a real need to develop newmulticast management solutions. In this paper we propose a newprotocol that provides mechanisms to actively manage and monitormulticast reachability and path quality. Our proposed protocol,called the Multicast Reachability Monitor (MRM), can be used tosend, receive, and collect statistics about a multicast stream.This information can then be presented using novel visualizationtechniques. The ultimate goal is to identify problems beforethey happen, as they are happening, and/or to assist in troubleshootingefforts. From this perspective, MRM is designed to be used as abuilding block for an integrated multicast network managementtool set. In describing MRM, we start by defining some importantcharacteristics of a multicast management system. We also describethe MRM protocol components. After discussing likely managementscenarios, we finish by describing the state of the MRM protocoland compare it to other available network management platforms.