Building the Case for Distributed Global Multicast Monitoring

Prashant Rajvaidya, and  Kevin C. Almeroth
Department of Computer Science
University of California
Santa Barbara, CA 93106-5110
{prash, almeroth}@cs.ucsb.edu

Key to the utility of multicast is the correct operation of the various
protocols. More importantly, these protocols must operate
infrastructure-wide. Infrastructure-wide monitoring is necessary
for effectively monitoring protocol operation. Consequently, monitoring is
needed for efficient management and troubleshooting of multicast networks.
In this paper we present results based on the analysis and comparison of
multicast routing and source announcement data collected by our global
monitoring system. This system, called Mantra, collects data from various
important locations in the Internet multicast topology. Our final conclusion,
and not one that can be drawn by looking at any individual router, is that
there exists a fair amount of inconsistency between routers in what
should be consistent global state.

Keywords: Multicast, Network Management, Global Multicast Monitoring, 
Network Layer Monitoring, Measurement, Routing.