Multicasting refers to the ability of transmitting data to multiple recipients without data sources needing to provide more than one copy of the data to the network. The network takes responsibility to route and deliver a copy of each data to every intended recipient. Multicasting has the potential to improve the network efficiency and performance (e.g., throughput and latency) through transferring fewer bits in communicating the same data to multiple recipients compared with unicast transmissions, reduce the amount of networking resources needed for communication, lower the network energy footprint, and alleviate the occurrence of congestion in the network. Over the past few decades, providing multicast services has been a real challenge for ISPs, especially to support home users and multi-domain network applications, leading to the emergence of complex application-level solutions. These solutions like Content Delivery and Peer-to-Peer networks take advantage of complex caching, routing, transport, and topology management systems which put heavy strains on the underlying Internet infrastructures to offer multicasting services. In reality, the main motivation behind the design of these systems is rather sharing content than offering efficient multicast services. In this paper, we propound Yodel, a name-based multicast network architecture that can provide multi-domain multicast services for current and future Internet applications. Compared to the wider array of other name-based network architectures with clean-slate infrastructure requirements, Yodel is designed to provide multicast services over the current Internet infrastructure. Hence, Yodel puts forward several design goals that distinguish it from other name-based network architectures with inherent multicast capabilities. This paper is prepared to discuss the Yodel architecture, its design goals, and architectural functions.

翻译：组播指无需数据源向网络提供超过一份数据副本即可将数据传输至多个接收方的能力。网络负责将每份数据的一个副本路由并传送至每个预期接收方。与单播传输相比，组播通过减少向多个接收方传输相同数据所需的比特数，有望提升网络效率与性能（如吞吐量和延迟），降低通信所需的网络资源量，减少网络能源足迹，并缓解网络拥塞的发生。过去几十年来，提供组播服务对互联网服务提供商（ISP）而言始终是巨大挑战，尤其是支持家庭用户和多域网络应用，由此催生了复杂的应用层解决方案。这些方案（如内容分发网络和对等网络）利用复杂的缓存、路由、传输和拓扑管理系统，对底层互联网基础设施造成沉重负担以提供组播服务。实际上，此类系统设计的主要动机更在于内容共享而非提供高效组播服务。本文提出Yodel——一种基于名称的组播网络架构，可为当前及未来互联网应用提供多域组播服务。与众多需要全新基础设施的基于名称的网络架构相比，Yodel专为在现有互联网基础设施上提供组播服务而设计。因此，Yodel提出了若干设计目标，使其区别于其他具备固有组播能力的基于名称的网络架构。本文旨在讨论Yodel架构、其设计目标及架构功能。