2008 Reports

Measurements of Multicast Service Discovery in a Campus

Hong, Se Gi; Srinivasan, Suman Ramkumar; Schulzrinne, Henning G.

Applications utilizing multicast service discovery protocols, such as iTunes, have become increasingly popular. However, multicast service discovery protocols are considered to generate network traffic overhead, especially in a wireless network. Therefore, it becomes important to evaluate the traffic and overhead caused by multicast service discovery packets in real-world networks. We measure and analyze the traffic of one of the mostly deployed multicast service discovery protocols, multicast DNS (mDNS) service discovery, in a campus wireless network that forms a single multicast domain of large users. We also analyze different service discovery models in terms of packet overhead and service discovery delay under different network sizes and churn rates. Our measurement shows that mDNS traffic consumes about 13 percent of the total bandwidth.