Multicast Communication - Protocols and Applications. the Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking. (Electronic book text)

The Internet is quickly becoming the backbone for the worldwide information society of the future. Point-to-point communication dominates the network today, however, group communication--using multicast technology--will rapidly gain importance as digital, audio, and video transmission, push technology for the Web, and distribution of software updates to millions of end users become ubiquitous. Multicast Communication: Protocols and Applications explains how and why multicast technology is the key to this transition. This book provides network engineers, designers, and administrators with the underlying concepts as well as a complete and detailed description of the protocols and algorithms that comprise multicast.