Extending differentiated services architecture for multicasting provisioning

This article deals with the integration of multicasting in Differentiated Services (DiffServ) networks. We shortly introduce the main problems and the research activities in this area, in order to define the problem and give a clear picture of the current state-of-the-art. Then, we propose a solution, which provides the multicast functionality and conforms to the DiffServ architecture's basic principles. The main idea is to extend the typical DiffServ components to support multicast operations. We also present an algorithm for the calculation of the minimum-cost tree, which connects the source with the destinations, taking into account the available bandwidth per service class. Important implementation issues are analyzed and it is shown how the whole architecture can be deployed. Moreover, we evaluate the proposed mechanism, using a number of experiments and simulation tests. Finally, we compare our framework with other QoS provisioning schemes.