Monitoring quality of service in enterprise multicast networks

The rapid growth of multicast services in IP networks has shown the limitations of traditional network management tools in monitoring the quality of multicast delivery. Because of the peculiar characteristics of multicast routing trees and the potential of message implosion problem, service delivery in multicast networks is more complex than in traditional unicast networks [1,2]. Monitoring networks is important to observe and maintain the quality of service (QoS) as specified in the Service Level Agreement. Efficient monitoring tools are necessary to observe the health of the multicast delivery trees, to report faults and performance problems, such as high latency or packet loss in the delivery path, unreachable members, and abnormal disconnections, due to routing misconfigurations or bugs in the protocol implementation [3]. Thus, the deployment of multicast services requires easyto- use and easy-to-integrate management tools that are based on a widely used network management protocol, such as Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) [4].