Method and apparatus for building a medium cost, self similar, self organizing multicast routing tree

摘要

A method for building a hierarchical multicast tree which is centered around a specific node in an Internet Protocol (IP) communications network. The method on a subnetwork comprising dynamically electing a subnetwork leader node for each subnetwork using multicast communications confined to the subnetwork. Receiving a configuration file containing a list of all the network addresses of the nodes in a network. Receiving a number of permissible connections each subnetwork leader node in the network is permitted with other subnetwork leader nodes. And establishing a multicast connection between each subnetwork leader node as identified in the configuration file so that there is a multicast connection path from each subnetwork leader node for each subnetwork and a subnetwork containing a network leader node. In another embodiment, a system and computer readable medium is disclosed to carry out the above method.