Researchers and commercial developers have proposed several protocols to enable efficient multi-point communication both at the IP layer and at the application or overlay layer. However, no single protocol has made enough headway in terms of deployment for it to span the entire Internet. In fact, we believe that none of the existing multicast or broadcast protocols will become the sole dominant Internet broadcasting technology any time in the near future. Instead, we expect islands of non-interoperable broadcast connectivity. To address this, we propose an architecture that enables the composition of different broadcast-capable networks, each with its own broadcast protocol, to provide an end-to-end broadcast service. We call this architecture the Broadcast Federation. In this paper, we describe the architecture along with a prototype implementation and preliminary results from the prototype.

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