Issues on the IP multicast service behaviour over the next-generation satellite-terrestrial hybrid networks

Our main focus here is to study the IP multicast service behaviour over the next-generation of satellite-terrestrial hybrid networks for which we develop a general architecture and we enumerate their main characteristics. We first focus on the Internet Group Membership Protocol (IGMP) feedback implosion problem and we present the exponential feedback raise that able to provide sufficiently stable expectation values across a large group size. Then, we propose and compare different approaches that can be used to enable the multicast in the on-board satellite switch. We show that the approach based on maintaining a multicast beams table (MBT) containing the list of spot beams concerned by each multicast group is the most suitable approach because it allows an efficient and transparent integration of satellite links in the Internet. In fact, the on-board switch monitors the IGMP reports and queries sent over the satellite link and update the MBT entries. We also turn our attention to multicast routing protocols. We present some undesirable behaviour of DVMRP, PIM-DM, and PM-SM. For DVMRP and PIM-DM, we identify some configurations where the satellite receivers may receive duplicated packets and we propose a method to overcome this problem. We then develop a configuration policy of PIM-SM in hybrid networks concerning the choice of the list of rendezvous point (RPs) and the switching from the RP-routed tree to the shortest path tree