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An Investigation into Multicasting

Nowadays, the Internet is being utilized increasingly more for communicating real-time (multimedia) data to multiple recipients, i.e., multicasting. Our goal is to investigate the network processing operations that are involved in supporting multicasting and to determine which operations are time-critical. Traditionally, investigations on such routers have been focussing on packet forwarding and functionalities of other protocols found in lower layers of the TCP/IP protocol stack. In this paper, we present our investigation of the Internet Group Management Protocol that belongs to a higher layer of the TCP/IP protocol stack. The methodology encompasses the creation of benchmarks reflecting the IGMP functionalities and subsequently the profiling of the created benchmarks in order to determine the most time-critical operations. Next to determining the timecritical operations, the mentioned simulation environment also provided results on instruction distribution, cache behavior, and branch prediction accuracy. Preliminary results suggest that the operations involved in multicasting are memory-intensive as about 50% of the operations are memory-related operations. Such results can be utilized in the design of future network processors. Keywords— Benchmarking, profiling, multicast, IGMP, videoconferencing.