This paper proposes a managed IP multicast platform that enables IP multicast services to be used for business. Nowadays, many business applications have switched from traditional network platforms to the IP platform. Among these applications, one-to-many or many-to -many types of applications are especially essential to business users. These applications may use IP Multicasting for transmitting data to many users. However, for business applications, it is difficult to use the present IP Multicast services, because they lack many requirements for business usage. The requirements are address management, authentication, time management, and guaranteed throughput. To satisfy the business users, we made the design of a managed IP multicast platform that will meet these requirements. Our platform, which separates the routing control layer and the packet forwarding layer, is called GMN-CL (Connection Technologies for Global Mega-media Network). The routing control layer manages routing information and controls network routing centrally, so it can understand the whole network situation and perform efficient routing. The packet forwarding layer can concentrate completely on forwarding, so the forwarding speed and copying speed is higher than when using routers. We have implemented our design of a managed IP multicast platform over GMN-CL. This paper reports the system design, implementation, and evaluation.

We propose a hardware-based packet forwarder for multi-gigabit IP backbone networks. The conventional Internet deploys routers as a key block, but its software-controlled architecture makes it hard to scale up the packet forwarders, especially for table-lookup processes. We propose introducing a pure connectionless (CL) switching approach with a hardware-based forwarder to construct the core part of a scalable IP multi-gigabit backbone. Compared to a software-based forwarder, the table-lookup time is reduced to 100 ns by using content-addressable memory. This hardware-based pipeline implementation easily achieves a maximum forwarding performance of up to 9. 6-Gbps, or 23 million packets per second, for applications ranging from traditional best-effort IP applications to newly emerging time-critical ones. We also consider additional processing when transferring IP packets to enhance best-effort quality. This is done using selective packet-level discarding, including early packet discard and its enhancement, to achieve minimum bandwidth guaranteed service at the packet level. We discuss the IP backbone scalability issue from the viewpoint of new IP-forwarder technologies, paying special attention to connection-oriented (CO) vs. CL switching and hardware vs. software implementation. A pure CL switching solution consisting of a CL server (CLS) and a CL client (CLC) is proposed to balance the hardware- and software-based CL transport functions. As a first step to this solution, a compact CLS has been developed. It supports 600-Mbps throughput and up to 9. 6-Gbps forwarding power using a modular architecture. It was evaluated in an ATM field trial using an experimental network. The results show the effectiveness of our approach to providing enhanced best effort services.