The state-oriented design of IP multicast may lead to the scalability problem, especially when there is a very large number of concurrent multicast groups in the network. Motivated by this problem, explicit multicast offers a stateless design using header space of multicast data packets. In this paper, we propose a novel stateless scheme called Linkcast that efficiently eliminates processing overhead of explicit multicast protocols. In Linkcast, the multicast sender encodes the tree listing its links in a proper way. The tree code is sent with every multicast data packet. Simulation results and experiments with real-trees show that Linkcast completely eliminates processing overhead of other explicit multicast protocols such as Xcast with comparable header size overhead.

Due to the cost of multicast state management, multicast address allocation, inter-domain multicast routing of traditional IP multicast scheme, ASM leads to a search for other multicast schemes. This paper presents a new solution to the problems mentioned above based on IPv6. The proposed scheme provides an enhanced scheme supporting the strengths of SSM in basic Xcast. This is achieved by adding MLDv2 operations at recipient's side and a new control plane into existing Xcast. The proposed scheme does not only provide the transparency of traditional multicast schemes to sources and recipients, but it also enhances the routing efficiency in networks. Intermediate routers do not have to maintain multicast state, so that it results in a more efficient and scalable mechanism to deliver native multicast datagrams. Also, the seamless integration in Mobile IPv6 can support multicast efficiently for mobile nodes in IPv6 networks by avoiding tunnel avalanches and tunnel convergence. We've attempted to prove this alternative architecture by both simulation and implementation, respectively. Our approach cannot fundamentally perform for many large groups distributed widely as effectively as traditional multicast schemes. However, we believe that the resulting scheme is simple, efficient, robust, transparent, and to the extent possible, scalable in case that recipients are clustered in subnets.