MEDIA – An approach to an efficient integration of IPv 6 and ATM multicast environments

1 Department of Informatics Engineering of the University of Coimbra 2 Guarda Polytechnic Institute 3 ESTG – Leiria Polytechnic Institute Abstract This paper presents a new approach to the integration of the promising Internet Protocol version 6 (IPv6) with Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) for multicast networking environments. Multicast technology has been the subject of special interest in recent years in terms of its applicability to present and future networks, especially by the Internet2 group. Nowadays, an increasing number of applications as, for example, distance learning, virtual reality and distributed simulation, need multicasting in order to be scalable, feasible and effective. This paper proposes a new set of unicast and multicast algorithms for IPv6-over-ATM overlay-models that take advantage of inherent properties of IPv6 and ATM not sufficiently explored in existing models. Additionally, the use of ATM multicast addresses is proposed and evaluated. The applicability of the proposed approach is illustrated in a scenario where the provision of Quality of Service (QoS) according to the DiffServ architecture is supported.