IP multicast resource and topology discovery using a fan-out decrement mechanism

摘要

As the use of IP multicast sessions becomes widespread, the potential benefits derived from currently unavailable topological information on multicast distribution trees may become increasingly critical. In this paper we propose a framework for discovering the topology of shared multicast trees based on a novel fan-out decrement mechanism analogous to time -to -live (TTL) decrementing in IP. We propose an algorithm for topology discovery based on the matrix of path/fan-out distances among a set of E session members-the algorithm's computational complexity is O(|E|~2).