Quality of Service Multicasting over Differentiated Services Networks

This paper proposes a solution to support real-time multicast traffic with Quality of Service (QoS) constraints over Differentiated Services (DiffServ) IP networks. Our solution allows multicast users to dynamically join and leave the multicast tree. Moreover, it allows a multicast user which has negotiated a best-effort session to upgrade to a QoS-enabled session. Our solution is backward compatible with the Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) scheme. It combines two ideas. First, resource availability along a new QoS path is verified via a probe-based approach. Second, QoS is maintained by marking replicated packets with a special DSCP value, before forwarding them on the QoS path.