• Journal of KIISE:Information Networking
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• v.27 no.3
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• pp.348-359
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• 2000

Most of the important real time multimedia applications require multipoint transmissions. To support these applications in ATM based Intermet environments, it is important to provide efficient IP multicast transportations over ATM networks. IETF proposed MARS(Multicast Address Resolution Server) as the service architecture to transport connectionless IP multicast flows over connection oriented ATM VCs. MARS assumes UNI3.0/3.1 signalling. Since UNI3.0/3.1 does not provide any means for receivers to request a join for a multicast ATM VC, MARS provides overlay service to relay join request from IP multicast group members to the sources of the multicast group. Later on, ATM Forum standardized UNI4.0 signalling which is provisioned with a new signalling mechanism called LIJ(Leaf Initiated Join). LIJ enables receivers to directly signal the source of an ATM VC to join. In this paper, we propose a new service architecture providing IP multicast flow transportation over ATM networks deploying UNI4.0 signalling. The proposed architecture is named UNI4MARS. It comprises service components same as those of the MARS. The main functionality provided by the UNI4MARS is to provide source information to the receivers so that the receivers may exploit LIJ to join multicast ATM VCs dynamically. The implementation overhead of UNI4MARS and that of MARS are compared by a course of simulations. The simulation results show that the UNI4MARS supports the dynamic IP multicast group changes more efficiently with respect to processing, memory and bandwidth overhead.