Abstract

The Internet revolution introduced a single, adaptive abstraction layer for global communication. Today, IP interconnects millions of applications, which themselves are bound to the present IP layer via the socket API. However, this tightly shaped concept failed to evolve into a service-open environment. Advanced network functions such as mobility or group communication are hindered to disseminate despite of manifold application needs.

Multicast communication services are one of the longest debated issues in the 30 years history of the Internet. Disagreement over countless approaches and solutions to the IP host group model has led to a strongly divergent state of deployment. Stimulated by the need of applications, alternative multicast mechanisms have been developed. P2P technologies have enabled group distribution on the application or service middleware layer, which can be transparently deployed with respect to the network layer.

In this presentation we start from the problem of mobile multicast, and continue to discuss proposals and possible solutions for establishing a mobility-agnostic group communication layer. The Hybrid Shared Tree multicast approach is outlined to support a mobility-agnostic integration of interdomain multicast routing on the overlay. Finally we give an outlook on emerging work that attempts to raise the service abstraction layer and API for a future Internet, opening an ISP-decoupled deployment perspective at end systems.

Bio

Prof. Thomas C. Schmidt teaches Computer Networks & Internet Technologies at Hamburg University of Applied Sciences (HAW) and leads the Internet Technologies research group (INET) there. Prior to moving to Hamburg, he headed the computer centre of FHTW Berlin for many years, and continued work as an independent project manager later. He studied mathematics and physics at Freie Universität Berlin and University of Maryland. He has continuously conducted numerous national and international projects. His current interests lie in a next generation Internet, mobile multicast and multimedia networking, as well as XML-based hypermedia information processing. He serves as co-editor and technical expert in many occasions and is actively involved in the work of IETF.