ATM Multicast Routing
Gill Waters, John Crawford · Kluwer Academic Publishers eBooks · 2005
Several multicast routing heuristics have been proposed to support multimedia services, both interactive and distribution, in high speed networks such as B-ISDN/ATM. Since such services may have large numbers of members and have real-time constraints, the objective of the heuristics is to minimise the multicast tree cost while maintaining a bound on delay. They should also be fast to compute and may need to be suitable for dynamic groups. We present an introduction to the problem and some key heuristic solutions and compare their performance. We show that the specific efficiency of a heuristic solution depends on the topology of both the network and the multicast, and that it is difficult to predict. Because of this unpredicatability, we propose the integration of two heuristics with Dijkstra’s shortest path tree algorithm to produce a hybrid that consistently generates efficient multicast solutions for all possible multicast groups in any network. The hybrid shows good performance over a wide range of networks, (both flat and hierarchical) and multicast groups, within differing delay bounds. We also discuss how heuristics can be deployed within the PNNI framework and briefly examine other issues related to multicast routing and PNNI.