Multicasting Extensions to Traffic Engineering in MPLS Networks

摘要

As multicast traffic grows in the Internet, the need for multicasting support in Traffic Engineering is increasing. The required functions for multicasting support in Traffic Engineering are the distribution of the group membership information as well as the information concerning resources allocated to groups, and the explicit setup of the multicasting tree. In this paper, we propose extensions of IGP routing and signaling protocols for supporting multicasting in Traffic Engineering.rnThe main contribution of this paper is to use IGP routing protocols (OSPF-TE, ISIS-TE) to advertise the group and resource information. This permits traffic engineered multicasting to be supported without requiring a dedicated multicasting protocol. Also, the signaling protocol uses uniform and structured path messages to setup a partial or full tree. Finally, we introduce a Traffic Engineering multicasting simulation tool, GLASS (GMPLS Lightwave Agile Switching Simulator), which implements traffic engineered multicasting mechanism for the proposed model. Using the GLASS, the advantages of Traffic Engineering for multicasting are illustrated