Multicast Tunneling Experiments
 

I would like to experiment with delivery of receiver audio over the Internet
to multicast receivers (clients); currently I use SIP and RTP (conventional
VoIP calls and UnRealMedia streams) which establish a single session per
listener, which is not the best use of bandwidth and rapidly saturates a
slow pipe with multiple listeners. Multicast delivery of audio avoids
this problem but is not widely implemented on the public Internet. However,
folks who happen to have a LAN connected to the 'Net through a *nix box
can run a multicast routing process (example, 'mrouted') to encapsulate
and tunnel multicast packets between LANs. The MBone virtual multicast
network (and similar projects) used this approach.

Would anyone care to set up a multicast tunnel with me for experiments?
I am running 'mrouted [version 3.8,prune,genid,mtrace]' and can provide
binaries and source code for whatever flavor of *ix you can run on your
edge router, or if you have Cisco IOS that supports DVMRP, that would
work well too.

Once connected, either side can deliver video and audio to multiple hosts
on the other side using no more bandwidth than is required for a single
unicast session. The BBC for example offers higher quality radio streams
to users who access them over multicast as it conserves bandwidth and
reduces cost, but in the U.S. there is less interest at the moment.

My receiver happens to be homebrew, which makes this request at least
nominally on-topic ;)

TIA,

Michael