We went through as many proposed ideas as we could, to get a thorough knowledge base of the current situation in Multicasting scenario, so that we could try to design a better solution for this problem. We have specified some of the resources we went through during our literature survey in the initial stages of our project.

1.2.1 Multicast

Multicast is the delivery of information to a group of destinations simultaneously using the most efficient strategy to deliver the messages over each link of the network only once, creating copies only when the links to the destinations split.

IP Multicast is a technique for one to many communication over an IP infrastructure. It scales to a larger receiver population by not requiring prior knowledge of who or how many receivers there are. Multicast utilizes network infrastructure efficiently by requiring the source to send a packet only once, even if it needs to be delivered to a large number of receivers. The nodes in the network take care of replicating the packet to reach multiple receivers only where necessary.

Once the receivers join a particular IP Multicast group, a multicast distribution tree is constructed for that group. The protocol most widely used for this is Protocol Independent Multicast or PIM. It sets up multicast distribution trees such that data packets from senders to a multicast group reach all receivers which have “joined” the group.