LIGHTWEIGHT APPLICATION LEVEL MULTICAST TUNNELING USING MTUNNEL

This paper presents a system, named mTunnel, for application level tun nelling of IP-multicast traffic in a lightweight manner, where the end -user is responsible for deciding which MBone-sessions and which IP-mu lticast groups to tunnel. mTunnel is primarily designed for easy deplo yment and easy-to-manage tunnelling. Information about currently tunne lled sessions and control of mTunnel is provided through a Web-interfa ce. To save bandwidth, tunnelled streams can be transcoded on the medi a level and traffic sent through the tunnel can be compressed by group ing several packets together and using statistical compression. The ov erall bandwidth reduction achieved, without modifying the media itself , has been measured to be between 5% and 14%, depending on the traffic and media type. (C) 1998 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.