Delivering reliable real-time multicast services over virtual private LAN service

The rapid growth in Internet technology has motivated service providers to consider deploying multicast based services like TV broadcast, video on demand and audio streaming services over the broadband network access infrastructure to their customers. In having multi protocol label switching (MPLS) as the core infrastructure protocol, providers are motivated to keep this type of service reliable to their customers. Three key challenges for delivering these services need to be taken into consideration: 1) transport bandwidth efficiency 2) service performance 3) quality of service associated with multicast application. In this article, we investigate performances of QoS metrics and reliability using virtual private LAN services (VPLS) as the transport media for multicast services. We describe experiments related to the deployment of multicast services, such as delivery of high-quality video and audio conferencing using our VPLS testbed. We further investigate the performance and reliability of multicasting over VPLS experimentally using our Optical Networks Research Lab [ONRL] testbed