Session management of relay-based overlay multicast for managed group applications

In spite of the capability to provide efficient delivery of service, IP multicast has not been used widely because of technical limitations as well as management-related issues [1]. Overlay multicast is introduced to overcome these problems which make it difficult to deploy various services requiring group communications. The multiple end-user hosts organize multicast delivery path forming a group. Therefore, overlay multicast needs group management, a.k.a., session and membership management to provide robust and resilient group services. This paper proposes session and membership management method for overlay multicast. This paper describes the required session and membership management functions, and presents how those functions are processed. This paper will be helpful to service provider who needs to provide overlay multicast based service or for those who needs to enhance multicast-based service management.