Supporting Quality of Service in IP multicast networks

Developers and providers of data, voice and video applications have to satisfy numerous Quality of Service (QoS) requirements and cope with different architectures emerging to provide these QoS in the Internet. IntServ, DiffServ or MPLS are technologies currently used in different administrative domains in the Internet to provide QoS. With multicast applications emerging, such as video conferencing, distance learning and tele surgery, it has become almost impossible to provide end-to-end QoS over multiple administrative business domains without interworking these technologies. This paper analyses general issues on supporting QoS for multicast applications and reviews different ways to implement IP multicasting in ImServ, DiffServ or MPLS based networks. Subsequently, network configurations based on these different architectures and their interworking to provide end-to-end QoS are also discussed. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.