Multicast State Distribution by Joins Using Multiple Shortest Paths

Damien Magoni (1) , Pascal Lorenz (2)

1 LSIIT - Laboratoire des Sciences de l'Image, de l'Informatique et de la Télédétection
2 MIPS - Modélisation, Intelligence, Processus et Système

The lack of resources in routers will become a crucial issue with the deployment of state storing protocols. In particular, single or any source multicast protocols will most probably take over large amounts of resources for maintaining multicast tree information. The aim of this paper is to study the possibility and benefit of using multiple shortest paths in order for a new member to reach a multicast tree. Such a mechanism would not reduce the overall amount of state information in the network but it would distribute this amount more evenly among all routers. The idea is to use alternate shortest paths provided by the underlying unicast routing protocol to avoid saturated routers, that is, routers that cannot or do not want to store any more multicast state information. As the simulation results are very sensitive to the topology, we have used subgraphs of an Internet map. We have then simulated our multipath join mechanism and have found that depending on the tree size, the use of our mechanism can increase successful join attempts by up to 55% when the network is half saturated.

Domaines: Réseaux et télécommunications [cs.NI]

Damien Magoni, Pascal Lorenz. Multicast State Distribution by Joins Using Multiple Shortest Paths. Journal of Interconnection Networks, 2005, 6 (2), pp.115-129. ⟨10.1142/S0219265905001344⟩. ⟨hal-00344482⟩