Multicast Communication: Protocols, Programming, and Applications (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

The Internet is quickly becoming the backbone for the worldwide information society of the future. Point-to-point communication dominates the network today, however, group communication--using multicast technology--will rapidly gain importance as digital, audio, and video transmission, push technology for the Web, and distribution of software updates to millions of end users become ubiquitous.

Multicast Communication: Protocols and Applications explains how and why multicast technology is the key to this transition. This book provides network engineers, designers, and administrators with the underlying concepts as well as a complete and detailed description of the protocols and algorithms that comprise multicast.

* Presents information on the entire range of multicast protocols, including, PIM-SM, MFTP, and PGM and explains their mechanisms, trade-offs, and solid approaches to their implementation
* Provides an in-depth examination of Quality of Service concepts, including: RSVP, ST2, IntServ, and DiffServ
* Discusses group address allocation and scoping
* Discusses multicast implementation in ATM networks
* Builds a solid understanding of the Mbone and surveys the successes and current limitations of real multicast applications on the Internet such as videoconferencing, whiteboards, and distance learning

This book wins points for its physical design, not only because it's a durable hardback, but also because the pages are well organized: one column contains the body text; the remaining space provides terms, questions, and brief phrases that describe what's adjacent to them in the text. It's almost as if the book were pre-annotated; and there's plenty of white space to make notes, if you're so inclined. The documentation on the Internet's Multicast Backbone (Mbone) is both excellent and interesting, but the discussion on how Mbone traffic is limited to subnets, domains, countries, and geographic regions, or not limited at all, is really informative. --David Wall

Topics covered: Multicast schemes, explained for system administrators and software developers; multicast routing (including DVMRP, multicast OSPF, and PIM); how to guarantee Quality of Service (QoS) for conferencing and other media that have high bandwidth requirements; implementation of multicasting across several transport protocols (including UDP, XTP, and MTP); and the functioning of the Mbone and its most popular applications.