The sustained expansion of Internet communications continues to generate new services and network applications. At the same time, the exponential growth in the number of concurrent users who want to simultaneously access shared data in corporate intranets, as well as the global Internet, has generated the need for applications that provide data access while minimizing bandwidth requirements. The implementation strategy adopted by many of these emerging applications involves sending packets from one or more senders to a group of recipients—in a single operation. This technique is referred to as “IP Multicast.”

This paper presents a review of IP multicast, but given the immensity of the field and its continuing evolution, this review is by no means exhaustive. It also includes an overview of multicast test challenges—and Ixia’s approach to testing multicast technologies to determine the scalability and performance of a multicast system. Finally, this paper reviews the importance of validating the conformance of various multicast technologies to the growing number of Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) Drafts and RFCs associated with multicast. Multicast testing before, as well as after, deployment of network equipment helps ensure a fully