mDNS - A Proposal for Hierarchical Multicast Session Directory Architecture

Bandwidth in the Internet is constantly increasing. The last mile problem of the Internet has almost been solved. Multimedia has emerged as a dominant type of traffic on the Internet. Multicast is increasingly seen as the delivery vehicle of choice for multimedia streams. What has been the one true stumbling roadblock in widespread use of multicast is the lack of a convenient mechanism for multicast session discovery. This paper examines existing techniques that try to address this issue, highlighting the benefits and drawbacks of such schemes. It then proposes the authors' hierarchical and globally scalable session directory architecture.