MRMON: Remote multicast monitoring

Although IP multicasting has been deployed for more than a decade, management of multicast networks and service is still a challenging problem. The fact that IP multicast is a receiver-oriented and stateless protocol makes end-to-end multicast monitoring intractable task. Important multicast information such as join/leave status, group membership, tree information, path/traffic characteristics, and session status is either unrevealed or distributed in various locations on the network. In this paper, we present a new remote passive multicast monitoring infrastructure, called MRMON, to capture, analyze and present multicast session, traffic and membership information at real-time. The MRMON probes inhabit a well-organized multicast information structure (MIB) that provides a comprehensive view of multicast network activities in remote subnets. We show how information can be collected from different MRMON probes and then correlated to diagnose multicast session problems. MRMON is a crucial step toward effective multicast management, and our goal is to promote MRMON as a standard MIB in multicast management.