Security and Routing Scoped IP Multicast Addresses

IP multicast is an efficient and scalable network layer delivering method for multimedia content to a large number of receivers across the Internet. It saves the network bandwidth and optimizes the processing overhead of the source. However, current IP multicast deployment is still facing many deployment complexities. In particular, the duality and the strong relationship between multicast addressing and routing along with the absence of an integrated multicast access control security mechanism have prevented a broader deployment of multicasting over large and public network infrastructures such as the Internet. To solve multicast scoping and autonomic multicast routing triggering issues, we propose a new scope based and hierarchical multicast control and routing protocol . Our approach introduces a new multicast addressing scheme that embeds simultaneously a plurality of hierarchical scopes and associates each scope with a specific access control and routing method. We evaluate the performance of our solution with respect to access control overhead and we analyse its strengths and limitations compared to related works.