Hybrid Multicast

Nowadays Internet TV (IPTV) is becoming more and more popular; number of IPTV subscribers increases exponentially. Internet Service Providers (ISPs) face challenge of video distribution to multiple users. Multicasting is one of the most efficient ways for media distribution over the network. There are two widely used techniques of multicasting. IP Multicasting is a way by which Internet Service Provides can distribute the TV content over the Internet effectively; however it requires hardware update at every single LAN. The other way is Overlay Multicast (OM), which is more flexible, and easy to deploy, but performance is significantly worse due to lack of knowledge about physical condition of network. Our study shows that if we combine both of these techniques, we can achieve much better performance. We implement a new software application called Hybrid Multicast (HM) that can be installed at any type of network. HM tries to use IP Multicast wherever available since it has better performance. If there is no such capability, it uses OM.