IPv6 and multicast filtering for high-performance multimedia applications

It is widely acknowledged that the IPv4 address space will be close to exhaustion within the next few years, and the future growth of the Internet increasingly depends on the timely deployment and availability of IPv6. Both the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) and the Australian Government have recently issued statements pushing for the adoption of IPv6. This paper reports on our experiences in migrating CSIROpsilas multicast-based high-performance multimedia platform, currently used in medical conferencing and remote education applications, to IPv6. Application code changes, along with network equipment configuration, are discussed. Additionally, to optimise network bandwidth and end system resource usage, we implement and compare three multicast filtering techniques: at the application, in the OS kernel, and in the network via source specific multicast (SSM). We show that the integrated multicast support in IPv6 allows high-performance multimedia applications to be enhanced with minimum effort when migrating to IPv6.