Chapter 6
CONCLUSIONS AND FUTURE
WORK
The ability to guarantee efficient data delivery with the increasing number of users is a
major challenge in designing routing protocols for wired and wireless networks. Any
number of Internet users using fixed or mobile devices should be able to connect to the
Internet and expect to get the information they need regardless to the underlying routing
protocols running in the network routers. This ability of assurance in delivering required
information with increasing number of users resulted in people designing multicast
routing protocols taking into consideration the scalability feature in their design.
6.1 General Evaluation
The increase in the number of users requesting access to multicast services will increase
the amount of information stored in the source node and intermediate routers to guarantee
data delivery. This huge increase of information will cause more delay in forwarding data
and will reduce the number of successfully delivered data packets. One of proposed
solutions to this issue is to reduce the amount of information stored about users by using
explicit messages to carry part of this information during the data delivery.
Providing scalable multicast in the Internet has attracted attention from the research
community working in the networking area. This interest creates has grown with the high
increase in the Internet users, this can be concluded from the background and related
work discussed in Chapter 2 and Chapter 3 in this thesis. In these chapters, it can be
noticed that most of the efforts made were to reduce the state information kept in the
group members to provide multicast packet delivery. The proposed solutions for reducing
the state information are mostly achieved by moving part of the information stored in the
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