A Distributed Approach to Multicast Session Discovery

Media distribution to large groups of subscribers can be done more efficiently using IP multicast rather than via IP unicast. The resultant efficiency and bandwidth saving, can further improve the quality of service perception at the subscriber's terminal. Less bandwidth requirement will help reduce service providers with operating cost and further reduce congestion in the core network. There is however a dearth in user demand for this technology and low deployment by the ISPs. This book explores the reasons for this lack of user demand and the lack of deployment of the technology, and provides a solution to a problem that has long undermined the usefulness of IP multicast. It proposes an efficient service architecture for multicast sessions discovery by end users. The described system allows bookmarking of useful multicast sessions. The global service framework described in this book maintains the validity of these bookmarks at end user terminals even if the multicast session parameter changes later on.