Scalable and Fault-Tolerant Architecture for Internet Multicasting Using Meshes

摘要

The current architecture of Internet Protocol (IP) multicasting is limited by the early binding of the membership of a router in a multicast group to the packet forwarding decisions the router must make for that group. The authors present a new architecture for IP multicasting that addresses these limitations by decoupling the mechanisms used for group addressing, group creation and management, and multipoint communication within a group. A new protocol is presented for the creation and management of multicast meshes that substitute for the traditional multicast trees as the underlying routing structure for multipoint communication within groups. Using simulation experiments, the overhead of mesh-multicast signaling and its packet-delivery ratios are compared against the overhead incurred with protocol independent multicast, dense mode (PIM-DM) and core-based tree (CBT), which are well-known examples of tree-based multicasting in the Internet.