Introduction

Abstract

Multicasting is a fundamental communication paradigm. Various reallife applications can be described by using a one-to-many communication model. For example, any subscription service, such as, subscription to a newspaper, subscription to a professional society or subscription to a group of specific interest, can be modeled as a multicast service, because the information within the subscription group is common and the same information needs to be transmitted to all the group members. Similarly, any kind of collaboration or conferencing which involves multiple participants can be modeled as a many-to-many multicast communication. This is true because the same information needs to be propagated to multiple recipients at the same time. The most popular services, such as, television and radio are multicast by definition. The members of the multicast groups are those that tune in to the corresponding TV or radio stations. Stock feeds and news tickers also belong to this category of one-to-many communication, because the same information is being received simultaneously by multiple recipients.