Multicasting moves ahead, Initiative showcases Internet technology at Interop

Internet protocol multicasting made a big splash at the recent Networld+Interop show, as multicasting supporters joined forces to produce the the technology's first multivendor demonstration of the technology.

Sponsored by the IP Multicast Initiative and Stardust Technologies, which manages the initiative, the Multicast Video Channel demonstration featured a series of video and audio clips broadcast simultaneously from multiple vendors' software products over the show's network, the InteropNet, which incorporated several technologies.

The video clip was sent to a video player over an NTSC feed to a bank of servers from eight vendors: Microsoft, IBM, Progressive Networks, Vivo Software, Precept Software, White Pine Software, VDONet and Starlight Networks. A single video stream from each vendor was then transmitted via a multicast-enabled router to an asynchronous transfer mode switch, then over the InteropNet network to another ATM switch. The video then moved on to another multicast-enabled router and was distributed to multiple locations, including the booths of IPMI members.

"It's significant that this number of vendors could multicast this content simultaneously over all these different products and technologies," said Marty Bickford, director of partner relations at Stardust Technologies. "It shows that IP multicast can be used in this wide variety of network topologies.

Multicast technology has long been touted as a more efficient use of bandwidth than traditional unicast technology. While unicasting creates a separate data stream between the sender and each receiver for each piece of information, multicasting enables the delivery of a single stream of data to multiple receivers. The stream travels between multicast-enabled routers until it reaches the last possible router that is common to all the users who have requested that data, where it is duplicated and distributed.

Multicast technology has been deployed for several years as part of the multicast backbone, a network that overlays the Internet and has recently gained favor with Internet service providers, Bickford said.

"We're seeing ISPs starting to realize that this is a must-have, not something they can wait around for anymore," he said. "Many ISPs are multicast-enabling their networks, and they will sell multicast services as a value-added service to both ISPs and corporations.

Many vendors are also equipping their products with multicast capabilities. IBM, for example, has incorporated multicast technology into its VideoCharger server and will incorporate it into its future platforms, said John Tavs, manager of TCP/IP technology and systems at IBM.

"The principal advantage to multicast is not having to set up individual TCP/IP addresses for each desktop [in the corporate arena]," Tavs said. "The server only has to generate an address once, which helps scale servers and makes networking more cost-effective.

The IPMI also added eight companies to its ranks at the show - BackWeb Technologies, BPG Worldwide, Collaborative Marketing, Digital Equipment Corp., Media4, Microspace Communications, Novell and ViaSat - boosting the initiative's membership to 62 companies.