A Hierarchical Multicast Routing Protocol
Ian Fuat Akyildiz, W. Yen · 2005
Multimedia applications will become more and more important and popular in the future networks [5]. Many multimedia applications including electronic newspaper and remote education require point to multipoint communication instead of point to point communication. The point to multipoint comniuniration is refered as multicast in this paper. The problem of multicast routing is considered as a graph theoretical optimal delivery tree problem. Several highly complex multicast routing algorithms have been proposed along these lines in recent years. These algorithms require intensive computation and message exchanges; thus they are unsuitable for practical protocol implcmciit ation. Kxisting multicast routing protocols were designed to trade optimality for time efliciency [2. 3. 61. Still, the existing protocols have either scalability or performance problems when applied in the wide area network environment [l, 41. In this paper, a hierarchical multicast routing (IIMR) algorithm is proposed which uses the concepts of clusters and local cores to address tlicscl problems. This algorithm is simple, yet flexible enough to provide various routing modes to satisfy different users ' delay and scalability requirements. A set of protocols is designed to implement the algorithm. These protocols (a) are independent of the underlying unicast protocol; (b) exhibit low complexity and good scalability; (c) provide the upper bound