Bandwidth Management for Intranets Using Multicast Firewalls

The development of multicasting as the vehicle for multimedia content delivery has resulted in the proliferation of new applications that take advantage of the bandwidth optimization of multicast transmission. Nonetheless, enabling such applications to operate in an Intranet environment necessitates the use of multicast capable routers that are still in limited use. Multicast tunneling, while effective, introduces additional bandwidth requirements to support the environment. The emergence of H.323 based systems for multimedia applications has greatly increased the need for suitable mechanisms to control the flow of multimedia data through non-QoS capable networks.