Stealth Multicast: A New Paradigm in Bandwidth Conservation

With the trend of increasing demand for rich media content, it is only natural that there will be an increase in redundant network traffic. Hence, a wide variety of techniques have been developed to eliminate redundant traffic in the network ranging from multicast to caching. Multicast techniques suffer from deployment issues, while caching techniques offer limited benefit for data with close temporal proximity (i.e. streaming). In this thesis, a novel approach, stealth multicast is presented, which offers a practical solution for the adoption of network-level IP multicast. In short, stealth multicast dynamically combines redundant data payloads into multicast packets for transmission across a domain. At the edge of the domain, the packets are converted back to unicast, with neither the user applications nor the external domain aware of the presence of stealth multicast. Additionally, simulations are presented, showing stealth multicast approaches the efficiency of ideal multicast, with minimal increase in end-to-end delay.