Bandwidth-Aware Multicast Fast Rerouting Mechanism in Information-Centric Networking
Jianping Song, Xiaoyong Zhu, Jiali You · IEICE Transactions on Communications · 2025
The growth of real-time streaming services has significantly increased network bandwidth demands. In this context, multicast technology has garnered widespread attention as an effective means to alleviate bandwidth pressure. However, the inherent complexity of multicast routing poses significant challenges for failure recovery, necessitating swift and efficient responses to ensure reliability. Moreover, if link states are not considered during the failure recovery process, it may increase the load on existing links, leading to congestion and overloading of the network. In this paper, we propose a bandwidth-aware multicast fast rerouting mechanism based on Information-Centric Networking. The proposed mechanism precomputes a set of backup paths and dynamically assigns them to multicast groups based on network conditions, enabling fast rerouting and load balancing. To implement this mechanism, we designed a backup path construction algorithm based on routing tree transformations to compute the set of backup paths. Additionally, we propose a backup path selection algorithm that selects paths for multicast groups based on link load, aiming to achieve load balancing. Furthermore, we developed a bit-index-based forwarding mechanism to ensure packet transmission along backup paths without requiring routers to maintain backup state information for each group. Extensive simulation results demonstrate that the proposed mechanism outperforms baseline algorithms in terms of overload control and forwarding efficiency.