IGMP behaviour in multicast over satellite

IP Multicast supports to achieve a resource efficient way for the communication between one to many or many to many devices. It provides many benefits to the network operators and saves their scare bandwidth as it minimizes the unwanted router processing and load at sender by multicasting a single copy of data. Especially when the communication is being done over a costly medium like satellite, the IP multicast provides a reliable solution. This paper emphasizes on involving multicasting over the satellite network to provide connectivity to remote users for a light video conferencing application. While the selection of multicast routing protocols, the broadcast nature of satellite is considered and two different scenarios are simulated in OPNET. The scenario 1 involves the designated router between an end user and the satellite while the end user is directly connected to the satellite in the scenario 2. These scenarios i.e. Multicast over the satellite network with designated routers (scenario 1) and multicast over the satellite without a designated router (scenario 2) give special considerations to the IGMP behaviour over the satellite network to find out the best scenario in terms of the utilization.