Building Scalable and Secure Multicast Delivery Infrastructure in a Local Area Network

Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting is a method for one-to-many and many-to-many communication between hosts in an IP network. This communication happens in a real-time synchronous fashion. It is a useful mechanism for distributing management data in a Local Area Network (LAN). Management data includes frequent updating of host Operating System (OS), security patches, OS update for network hardware, new configuration updates, etc. In the absence of any admission control or a source identification, any host with malicious intent can disseminate malicious codes or rootkits exploiting the underlying multicast framework. Routing protocols like RIPv2 and OSPF use a certain form of authentication to exchange routing information with their peer routers. However, their authentication and the distribution of routing information in its present form has several security and performance-related issues. Motivated through these problems, in this paper, we propose an efficient and scalable multicast architecture for distributing management and routing information in a LAN. We use Core-based Tree (CBT) for constructing the multicast delivery tree and the pseudo identity-based encryption of the underlying cryptosystem. We also demonstrate that our proposed multicast architecture is immune to a number of popular attacks.

Supporting Quality of Service for Internet Multimedia Applications

The Internet has gone from near-invisibility to near-ubiquity and penetrated into every aspect of society in the past decades (Department of Commerce, 1998). The application scenarios have also changed dramatically, and now demand a more sophisticated service model from the network. In the early 1990s, there was a large-scale experiment in sending digitized voice and video across the Internet through a packetswitched infrastructure (Braden, Clark, & Shenker, 1994). These highly-visible experiments have depended upon three enabling technologies: (1) Many modern workstations now come equipped with built-in multimedia hardware, (2) IP multicasting, which was not yet generally available in commercial routers, and (3) Highly-sophisticated digital audio and video applications have been developed. It became clear from these experiments that an important technical element of the Internet is still missing: multimedia, which dominate increasing proportion of today’s data traffic, are not well supported on the Internet.

The Satellite Internet

The aim of this chapter is to show the satellite Internet as a new quality, which was created thanks to the convergence of satellite communication and data networks. The chapter describes the development of satellite communication and satellite data networks, presents methods of Internet access via satellite and discuss the opportunities and challenges of building effective commercial services based on satellite Internet. The main advantages of the satellite Internet are high bandwidth, very good availability (in practice: anywhere in the world), and natural IP multicasting. Although getting broadband Internet access by satellite is considered very expensive, independence from the local infrastructure results in the satellite Internet being a good solution for both business communications (a corporate network or its fragments) and remote area communications (rural communications and services to isolated communities).

Global Address Allocation for Wide Area IP-Multicasting

The IP-multicast transmission is the IP level answer for the growing one-to-many content spreading needs in multimedia applications (Hosszú, 2005). Nevertheless the address allocation and service discovery is a problematic field of this technology. Despite of the efficiency of the IP-multicast it has not been deployed in the whole Internet. Especially the global address allocation is a problematic part of the Internet-wide multicasting. This article addresses such problems in order to review the existing methods and the emerging research results. The IP-multicasting uses a shared IPv4 address range. In Internet-wide applications the dynamic allocation and reuse of the addresses is essential. Recent Internet-wide IP-multicasting protocols (MBGP/ MSDP/PIM-SM) have a scalability or complexity problem. The article introduces the existing solution for the wide-area multicasting and also proposes a novel method, which overcomes the limitations of the previous approaches.

IP Multicasting

The origins of IP multicasting go back to 1986. However, multicasting in its current form was introduced only in 1989. During 20 years of IP multicasting, the service has been evolving continuously – new multicast transport protocols have been designed, new group management protocols have been developed and new transport protocols and multicast applications have appeared. Nowadays, IP multicast is a mature solution, and concepts and protocols designed for multicasting are also used in non-multicast services.