Multicast communications - Present and future

Multicast communications have been expected as an effective way to disseminate information to potentially large number of receivers. IP multicast is a well- known multicast protocol for the Internet. However, IP multicast has several technical problems to be resolved until it is widely deployed in the Internet. These includes service-model of multicast group, reliable transport protocol, congestion control and security. A lot of researches trying to resolve these technical problems make multicast communications a hot research area in these couple of decades. This paper overviews the present style of IP multicast and clearlify technical issues of the present multicast communications. The paper also surveys important approaches to these problems and discuss about future directions of multicast communications.