Solution Strategy for Class D address problem in IP Multicast: MAAA

Solution Strategy for Class D address problem in IP Multicast: MAAA

ABSTRACT

Internet Protocol (IP) multicast is a smart technology on the internet for point to multipoint delivery. It results in bandwidth saving for sources and administrators of low-capacity domains, such as corporate networks. IP Multicast delivers source traffic to multiple receivers without adding any additional burden on the source or the receivers while using the least network bandwidth of any competing technology.  This technology is deployed for applications like audio and video conferencing, group collaboration, and file transfer for sending data from one location to one or more locations. All receivers interested in receiving the same stream of data are assigned to a multicast group. Each group is assigned a multicast address. Class D address space is used for IP multicast. This means that all IP multicast group addresses will fall in the range of 224.0.0.0 to 239.255.255.255. However, the class D addressing scheme used suffers from several drawbacks. There is no globally recognized method for allocating addresses uniquely to multicast groups. This results in data being delivered to different sessions if separate addresses are not allocated.
To overcome the address allocation problems in IP Multicast, the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) proposed the Multicast Address Allocation Architecture (MAAA). The MAAA is a complex architecture and does not resolve all the address allocation issues. In this paper, most of the Class D address allocation problem have been identified. Solutions have been proposed to overcome some of the problems of the MAAA architecture.