Multicast with an application-oriented networking (AON) approach

This paper proposes an efficient and scalable multicast scheme based on the concept of application-oriented networking (AON). The traditional IP multicast is bandwidth efficient but suffers from the scalability problem. The overlay multicast, proposed in recent decade, manages a data-dissemination tree at the application layer, and only utilizes unicasts among pairs of hosts; the overlay approach, however, usually incurs a considerable amount of redundant traffic. The essence of AON is to integrate application intelligence into the network. For AON-based multicasting, each packet will carry necessary explicit addressing information, instead of an implicit class-D group address, to facilitate the multicast data delivery. Each AON router will leverage the unicast IP routing table to compute necessary multicast copies and next-hop interfaces. The proposed AON multicast eliminates the need for constructing and maintaining the network-layer multicast routing table, while its bandwidth efficiency is very close to that of the IP multicast.