The future Internet is expected to support multicast applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. To facilitate this, QoS multicast routing protocols are pivotal in enabling new receivers to join a multicast group. However, current routing protocols are either too restrictive in their search for a feasible path between a new receiver and the multicast tree, or burden the network with excessive overhead. We propose QMRP, a new Qos-aware multicast routing protocol. QMRP achieves scalability by significantly reducing the communication overhead in constructing a multicast tree, yet it retains a high chance of success. This is achieved by switching between single-path routing and multiple-path routing according to the current network conditions. The high-level design of QMRP makes it operable on top of any unicast routing algorithm both intra-domain and inter-domain. Its responsiveness is improved by using a termination mechanism which detects the failure as well as the success of routing without the use of timeout. In addition, QMRP always constructs loop-free multicast trees.
展开▼
