Multicast Tools Taxonomy

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This page gives more detailed information about specific multicast tools.

This listing has not been actively maintained since 2004. These pages are made available for historical purposes.

| Index Anonymization Topology Workload Performance Routing Multicast Measurement Infrastructures |

Mantra

URL:	https://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/mantra/
Contact:	Prashant Rajvaidya (prash@cs.ucsb.edu) and Kevin Almeroth (almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu)
Overview:	Mantra (Monitor and Analysis of Traffic in Multicast Routers) is a tool for depicting snapshots of constituents of the multicast infrastructure from the point of view of multicast routers. Characteristics of multicast sessions and the behavior of participating hosts are graphed. Graphs indicating traffic flow based on MBGP route usage, routes gained, lost, or changed are also available. Multicast Source Discovery Protocol (MSDP) statistics are given for daily and weekly usage. Address allocation is monitored. Placement of Group Sources and Receivers, MSDP Sources, RPs, MBGP networks and DVMRP networks are presented geographically by mapping their IP addresses and net-blocks to corresponding lat-long values.
Access:	Results published at http://www.nmsl.cs.ucsb.edu/projects.html#mantra/ and https://www.caida.org/tools/measurement/mantra/

Mhealth

URL:	http://www.nmsl.cs.ucsb.edu/projects.html#mhealth
Contact:	David Makofske (davidm@cs.ucsb.edu) and Kevin Almeroth (almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu)
Overview:	Mhealth discovers and graphically displays the full network tree distribution and delivery quality for a group, in near real-time. Data logs can be used to isolate network faults by analyzing receiver lists over time, route histories and changes, as well as the location, duration, and frequency of data loss.
Access:	A beta version is freely downloadable

Mlisten

URL:	http://www.cc.gatech.edu/computing/Telecomm/projects/mbone/
Contact:	Kevin Almeroth (almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu)
Overview:	A tool for the collection and processing of MBone membership information. This tool can be used to generate information about (1) join and leave statistics, (2) connection time characteristics, and (3) multicast tree size and characteristics.
Access:	Freely downloadable

Mrouted

URL:	http://troglobit.github.io/mrouted.html
Contact:	Bill Fenner
Overview:	Displays multicast router configuration using the ASK_NEIGHBORS IGMP message to a specified multicast router. Results include version number of the queried router along with a list of the neighboring multicast routers. Metrics, thresholds, and flags settings are also available.
Access:	Freely downloadable at http://troglobit.github.io/mrouted.html

Mtrace

URL:	http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man3/mtrace.3.html
Contact:	Bill Fenner
Overview:	Multicast traceroute - returns a snapshot of the set of links used to connect a particular destination. A trace query is passed hop-by-hop along the reverse path from the receiver to the source, collecting hop addresses, packet counts, and routing error conditions along the path, and then the response is returned to the requestor. Additional information that can be obtained includes loss rates along the links, and the number of multicast packets flowing across each hop per second for that particular address.
Comment:	Results are not guaranteed and are not 100% reliable. However, this is currently the most effective tool for debugging mbone routing problems.
Access:	Freely downloadable at ftp://ftp.parc.xerox.com/pub/net-research/ipmulti/

Multicast Beacon

URL:	http://sourceforge.net/projects/multicastbeacon/
Contact:	N/A (unsupported)
Overview:	The Multicast Beacon is an active measurement tool used to monitor the performance of current multicast transmission on the network. It does this by injecting a steady stream of probes into a multicast group, and measuring performance information when the probes arrive at other beacons. It has two components: Beacon Client -- an active probing program running at each machine. A set of Beacons sends packets continuously to each other through a multicast session, and measures the performance of the transmission. It then reports to the Beacon Server periodically. The current version (v0.63) is written in Java. Beacon Server -- a central server collecting the performance information from the Beacon Clients. The v0.8 version of the Beacon Server is written in Perl. A set of measurement hosts send small probe packets to a particular multicast session, and also receive packets from the session in order to determine session transfer (network) performance. Each probe packet contains the originating Beacon Client's name, a sequence number, and a time stamp so that the receiving client is able to calculate the packet statistics. It also contains an Multicast Beacon-specific identifier to help filter out non-Beacon multicast traffic, so Beacons don't drown in traffic that isn't of interest. Because of the distributed nature of the measurement, Multicast Beacon is designed in such a way that clients can start or stop at any time without affecting other clients. Communication between client and server are handled via UDP. The Multicast Beacon can be used as a general-purpose performance measurement tool for current multicast traffic on the network. For example, you may run a Beacon at each participating site, and see how well the multicast traffic travels between them.
Access:	Freely downloadable at http://sourceforge.net/projects/multicastbeacon/

MultiMON

URL:	http://www.merci.crc.ca/mbone/MultiMON// (No longer available)
Contact:	J.L. Robinson (john.robinson@crc.ca) and J.A. Stewart (john.stewart@crc.ca)
Overview:	Collects, organizes, and displays all the IP multicast traffic detected at servers running MultiMON. This general purpose multicast monitoring tool is intended to monitor multicast traffic on local network segments, and is suitable for managing an intranet. Built on a client/server model, the data collectors (Servers) may be distant from the GUI front end displays (Clients).
Access:	No longer available

RM

URL:	http://ganef.cs.ucla.edu/~masseyd/Route/ (No longer available)
Contact:	Bill Fenner and Daniel Massey (masseyd@cs.ucla.edu)
Overview:	Monitors stability of various multicast routes within the existing multicast topology. RM tool collects data at the network layer by recording the DVMRP route updates issued by the local multicast routers. Results are displayed listing some of the most unstable routes and describing plausible reasons for their instability.
Access:	Results were published at http://ganef.cs.ucla.edu/~masseyd/Route/.

RTPmon

URL:
Contact:	Andrew Swan (aswan@cs.berkeley.edu) and David Bacher (drbacher@cs.berkeley.edu)
Overview:	Monitors control information exchanged between applications that implement Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP). Feedback from receivers, including loss rate and jitter, are displayed in a table that can be sorted in various ways to help isolate and diagnose multicast distribution problems.
Access:	No longer available

SDR-Monitor

URL:	http://www.nmsl.cs.ucsb.edu/projects.html#sdr-mon
Contact:	Kamil Sarac (ksarac@cs.ucsb.edu) and Kevin Almeroth (almeroth@cs.ucsb.edu)
Overview:	Effort to track, manage, and present information about the availability of world-wide sessions from the session directory (SDR). A collection of web pages has been put together, updated several times every hour, that displays an aggregated view of SDR-cache entries sent by participants from around the world.
Access:	Results published at http://imj.ucsb.edu/sdr-monitor/.