A QoS-aware multicast routing protocol

The future Internet is expected to support multicast applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. To facilitate this, QoS multicast routing protocols are pivotal in enabling new receivers to join a multicast group. However, current routing protocols are either too restrictive in their search for a feasible path between a new receiver and the multicast tree, or burden the network with excessive overhead. We propose QMRP, a new QoS-aware multicast routing protocol. QMRP achieves scalability by significantly reducing the communication overhead of constructing a multicast tree, yet it retains a high chance of success. This is achieved by switching between single-path routing and multiple-path routing according to the current network conditions. The high level design of QMRP makes it operable on top of any unicast routing algorithm in both intradomain and interdomain. Its responsiveness is improved by using a termination mechanism which detects the failure as well as the success of routing without the use of timeout. In addition, QMRP always constructs loop-free multicast trees     

The PIM architecture for wide-area multicast routing

The purpose of multicast routing is to reduce the communication costs for applications that send the same data to multiple recipients. Existing multicast routing mechanisms were intended for use within regions where a group is widely represented or bandwidth is universally plentiful. When group members, and senders to those group members, are distributed sparsely across a wide area, these schemes are not efficient; data packets or membership report information are occasionally sent over many links that do not lead to receivers or senders, respectively. We have developed a multicast routing architecture that efficiently establishes distribution trees across wide area internets, where many groups will be sparsely represented. Efficiency is measured in terms of the router state, control message processing, and data packet processing, required across the entire network in order to deliver data packets to the members of the group. Our protocol independent multicast (PIM) architecture: (a) maintains the traditional IP multicast service model of receiver-initiated membership, (b) supports both shared and source-specific (shortest-path) distribution trees, (c) is not dependent on a specific unicast routing protocol, and (d) uses soft-state mechanisms to adapt to underlying network conditions and group dynamics. The robustness, flexibility, and scaling properties of this architecture make it well-suited to large heterogeneous internetworks     

Explicit Multicasting for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper we propose an explicit multicast routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Explicit multicasting differs from common approaches by listing destination addresses in data packet headers. Using the explicit destination information, the multicast routing protocol can avoid the overhead of employing its own route construction and maintenance mechanisms by taking advantage of unicast routing table. Our protocol – termed Differential Destination Multicast (DDM) – is an explicit multicast routing protocol specifically designed for MANET environment. Unlike other MANET multicasting protocols, instead of distributing membership control throughout the network, DDM concentrates this authority at the data sources (i.e. senders) thereby giving sources knowledge of group membership. In addition, differentially-encoded, variable-length destination headers are inserted in data packets which are used in combination with unicast routing tables to forward multicast packets towards multicast receivers. Instead of requiring that multicast forwarding state to be stored in all participating nodes, this approach also provides the option of stateless multicasting. Each node independently has the choice of caching forwarding state or having its upstream neighbor to insert this state into self-routed data packets, or some combination thereof. The protocol is best suited for use with small multicast groups operating in dynamic MANET environment.     

A novel multicast traffic engineering technique in SDN using TLBO algorithm

In recent years, multicast communication is widely used by network providers to deliver multimedia contents. Quality of service (QoS) provisioning is one of the most important issues while transmitting multimedia contents using multicast. Traditional IP multicasting techniques suffer from reliability, scalability and have limitations to provide appropriate QoS for multimedia applications based on service level agreement (SLA). Nowadays, the advent of software defined networking (SDN), enables network providers to manage their networks dynamically and guarantee QoS parameters for customers based on SLA. SDN provides capabilities to monitor network resources and allows to dynamically configure desired multicasting policies. In this paper, we proposed a novel multicasting technique to guarantee QoS for multimedia applications over SDN. To deliver multimedia contents in an efficient manner, our proposed method models multicast routing as a delay constraint least cost (DCLC) problem. As DCLC problem is NP-Complete, we proposed an approximation algorithm using teaching–learning-based optimization to solve this problem. We evaluated our proposed method under different topologies. Experimental results confirmed that our proposed method outperforms IP multicast routing protocol, and it achieves a gain of about 25% for peak signal-to-noise ratio.     

The core-assisted mesh protocol

The core-assisted mesh protocol (CAMP) is introduced for multicast routing in ad hoc networks. CAMP generalizes the notion of core-based trees introduced for internet multicasting into multicast meshes that have much richer connectivity than trees. A shared multicast mesh is defined for each multicast group; the main goal of using such meshes is to maintain the connectivity of multicast groups even while network routers move frequently, CAMP consists of the maintenance of multicast meshes and loop-free packet forwarding over such meshes. Within the multicast mesh of a group, packets from any source in the group are forwarded along the reverse shortest path to the source, just as in traditional multicast protocols based on source-based trees. CAMP guarantees that within a finite time, every receiver of a multicast group has a reverse shortest path to each source of the multicast group. Multicast packets for a group are forwarded along the shortest paths front sources to receivers defined within the group's mesh. CAMP uses cores only to limit the traffic needed for a router to join a multicast group; the failure of cores does not stop packet forwarding or the process of maintaining the multicast meshes     

Incremental service deployment using the hop-by-hop multicast routing protocol

IP multicast is facing a slow take-off although it has been a hotly debated topic for more than a decade. Many reasons are responsible for this status. Hence, the Internet is likely to be organized with both unicast and multicast enabled networks. Thus, it is of utmost importance to design protocols that allow the progressive deployment of the multicast service by supporting unicast clouds. This paper presents HBH (hop-by-hop multicast routing protocol). HBH adopts the source-specific channel abstraction to simplify address allocation and implements data distribution using recursive unicast trees, which allow the transparent support of unicast-only routers. An important original feature of HBH is its tree construction algorithm that takes into account the unicast routing asymmetries. Since most multicast routing protocols rely on the unicast infrastructure, the unicast asymmetries impact the structure of the multicast trees. We show through simulation that HBH outperforms other multicast routing protocols in terms of the delay experienced by the receivers and the bandwidth consumption of the multicast trees. Additionally, we show that HBH can be incrementally deployed and that with a small fraction of HBH-enabled routers in the network HBH outperforms application-layer multicast.     

An Adaptive Multicast Tree with QoS Support for Heterogeneous Recipients

This paper proposes a new protocol called MQ, Multicast with QoS, which supports multimedia group communications with QoS guarantees for heterogeneous recipients. With MQ, while resource reservation is de-coupled from QoS multicast routing, they are integrated in a way to avoid the problem of sender-oriented path determination, a problem that occurs when RSVP is used in conjunction with QoS routing for heterogeneous reservations. Being a truly receiver-oriented and integrated scheme for multimedia multicasting, MQ supports such integration in a robust, scalable and loop-free way, accommodates heterogeneous users with varied QoS, dynamically adjusts QoS trees to improve resource utilization, and benefits from being an integrated mechanism to ensure end-to-end QoS services. We have also conducted simulations to evaluate the performance of MQ. MQ demonstrates its advantages to conventional loosely coupled integration of IP multicasting, resource reservation and QoS routing, in terms of better accommodation of heterogeneous users, higher scalability, lower blocking probability for users to join groups with service guarantee, and more efficient resource utilization to enhance system performance.     

Power aware scalable multicast routing protocol for MANETs

Multicasting is an effective way to provide group communication. In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), multicasting can support a wide variety of applications that are characterized by a close degree of collaboration. Since MANETs exhibit severe resource constraints such as battery power, limited bandwidth, dynamic network topology and lack of centralized administration, multicasting in MANETs become complex. The existing multicast routing protocols concentrate more on quality of service parameters like end‐to‐end delay, jitter, bandwidth and power. They do not stress on the scalability factor of the multicast. In this paper, we address the problem of multicast scalability and propose an efficient scalable multicast routing protocol called ‘Power Aware Scalable Multicast Routing Protocol (PASMRP)’ for MANETs. PASMRP uses the concept of class of service with three priority levels and local re‐routing to provide scalability. The protocol also ensures fair utilization of the resources among the nodes through re‐routing and hence the lifetime of the network is increased. The protocol has been simulated and the results show that PASMRP has better scalability and enhanced lifetime than the existing multicast routing protocols. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Alternate path routing for multicast

Current network-layer multicast routing protocols build multicast trees based only on hop count and policy. If a tree cannot meet application requirements, the receivers have no alternative. In this paper, we propose a general and modular architecture that integrates alternate path routing with the network's multicast services. This enables individual multicast receivers to reroute a multicast tree according to their needs, subject to policy restrictions. Our design focuses on the two primary components of this architecture - a loop-free path installation protocol and a scalable, distributed path computation algorithm. Based on a simulation study, we demonstrate that using alternate path routing enables receivers to find acceptable paths nearly as well as a link-state protocol, with much lower overhead. We also show that our approach scales to large networks and that performance improves as a multicast group grows in size.     

Application-layer multicasting with Delaunay triangulation overlays

Application-layer multicast supports group applications without the need for a network-layer multicast protocol. Here, applications arrange themselves in a logical overlay network and transfer data within the overlay. We present an application-layer multicast solution that uses a Delaunay triangulation as an overlay network topology. An advantage of using a Delaunay triangulation is that it allows each application to locally derive next-hop routing information without requiring a routing protocol in the overlay. A disadvantage of using a Delaunay triangulation is that the mapping of the overlay to the network topology at the network and data link layer may be suboptimal. We present a protocol, called Delaunay triangulation (DT protocol), which constructs Delaunay triangulation overlay networks. We present measurement experiments of the DT protocol for overlay networks with up to 10 000 members, that are running on a local PC cluster with 100 Linux PCs. The results show that the protocol stabilizes quickly, e.g., an overlay network with 10 000 nodes can be built in just over 30 s. The traffic measurements indicate that the average overhead of a node is only a few kilobits per second if the overlay network is in a steady state. Results of throughput experiments of multicast transmissions (using TCP unicast connections between neighbors in the overlay network) show an achievable throughput of approximately 15 Mb/s in an overlay with 100 nodes and 2 Mb/s in an overlay with 1000 nodes.     

Multicast Routing in Wireless Mesh Networks: Minimum Cost Trees or Shortest Path Trees?

There exist two fundamental approaches to multicast routing: shortest path trees (SPTs) and minimum cost trees (MCTs). The SPT algorithms minimize the distance (or cost) from the sender to each receiver, whereas the MCT algorithms minimize the overall cost of the multicast tree. Due to the very large scale and unknown topology of the Internet, computing MCTs for multicast routing in the Internet is a very complex problem. As a result, the SPT approach is the more commonly used method for multicast routing in the Internet, because it is easy to implement and gives minimum delay from the sender to each receiver, a property favored by many real-life applications. Unlike the Internet, a wireless mesh network (WMN) has a much smaller size, and its topology can be made known to all nodes in the network. This makes the MCT approach an equally viable candidate for multicast routing in WMNs. However, it is not clear how the two types of trees compare when used in WMNs. In this article we present a simulation-based performance comparison of SPTs and MCTs in WMNs, using performance metrics, such as packet delivery ratio, end-to-end delay, and traffic impacts on unicast flows in the same network.     

High-throughput multicast routing metrics in wireless mesh networks

The stationary nature of nodes in a mesh network has shifted the main design goal of routing protocols from maintaining connectivity between source and destination nodes to finding high-throughput paths between them. Numerous link-quality-based routing metrics have been proposed for choosing high-throughput routing paths in recent years. In this paper, we study routing metrics for high-throughput tree or mesh construction in multicast protocols. We show that there is a fundamental difference between unicast and multicast routing in how data packets are transmitted at the link layer, and accordingly how the routing metrics for unicast routing should be adapted for high-throughput multicast routing. We propose a low-overhead adaptive online algorithm to incorporate link-quality metrics to a representative multicast routing protocol. We then study the performance improvement achieved by using different link-quality-based routing metrics via extensive simulation and experiments on a mesh-network testbed, using ODMRP as a representative multicast protocol.Our extensive simulation studies show that: (1) ODMRP equipped with any of the link-quality-based routing metrics can achieve higher throughput than the original ODMRP. In particular, under a tree topology, on average, ODMRP enhanced with link-quality routing metrics achieve up to 34% higher throughput than the original ODMRP under low multicast sending rate; (2) the improvement reduces to 21% under high multicast sending rate due to higher interference experienced by the data packets from the probe packets; (3) heavily penalizing lossy links is an effective way in the link-quality metric design to avoid low-throughput paths; and (4) the path redundancy from a mesh data dissemination topology in mesh-based multicast protocols provides another degree of robustness to link characteristics and reduces the additional throughput gain achieved by using link-quality-based routing metrics. Finally, our experiments on an eight-node testbed show that on average, ODMRP using SPP and PP achieves 14% and 17% higher throughput over ODMRP, respectively, validating the simulation results.     

Quota-Based Multicast Routing in Delay-Tolerant Networks

Delay-Tolerant Networks (DTNs) are special types of network environments that are subject to delays and disruptions. Most research efforts on the DTN routing problem are focused on unicast routing but not multicast routing. Moreover existing DTN multicasting approaches are not efficient and flexible. In this paper, we propose a new multicast routing approach which can not only achieve a high delivery rate but also adapt to network conditions. Most importantly, our proposed approach need not maintain group membership. In other words, any interested users can freely join and leave any multicast groups, and this feature suitably fits into DTN environments.     

Bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees in large-scale ad-hoc networks

The purpose of this paper is to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale ad-hoc networks (MANETs). Recent routing protocols and multicast protocols in large-scale MANETs adopt two-tier infrastructures to avoid the inefficiency of the flooding. Hosts with a maximal number of neighbors are often chosen as backbone hosts (BHs) to forward packets. Most likely, these BHs will be traffic concentrations/bottlenecks of the network. In addition, since host mobility is not taken into consideration in BH selection, these two-tier schemes will suffer from more lost packets if highly mobile hosts are selected as BHs. In this paper, a new multicast protocol is proposed for partitioning large-scale MANET into two-tier infrastructures. In the proposed two-tier multicast protocol, hosts with fewer hops and longer remaining connection time to the other hosts will be selected as BHs. The objective is not only to obtain short and stable multicast routes, but also to construct a stable two-tier infrastructure with fewer lost packets. Further, previous MANET quality-of-service (QoS) routing/multicasting protocols determined bandwidth-satisfied routes for QoS applications. Some are implemented as a probing scheme, but the scheme is inefficient due to high overhead and slow response. On the contrary, the others are implemented by taking advantage of routing and link information to reduce the inefficiency. However, the latter scheme suffers from two bandwidth-violation problems. In this paper, a novel algorithm is proposed to avoid the two problems, and it is integrated with the proposed two-tier multicast protocol to construct bandwidth-satisfied multicast trees for QoS applications in large-scale MANETs. The proposed algorithm aims to achieve better network performance by minimizing the number of forwarders in a tree.     

平面网络中QOS多播路由算法研究与设计

多播通信这种兼顾了广播通信与单播通信两者优点的通信模式,已经被越来越多地应用于平面网络业务之中。首先讨论了面向源节点的多播路由策略。在分析传统多播路由算法中最佳链路选择函数的基础上,提出了一个新的最佳路由模型和QMRI算法,该算法成功地解决了网络中多播节点动态变化时的QOS路由选择问题。     

Improved Shuffled Frog-Leaping Algorithm Based QoS Constrained Multicast Routing for Vanets

Prompt and reliable communication between vehicular nodes are essential as its limited coverage and dynamic mobility rate introduces frequent change of network topology. The key feature of vehicular communication that establishes direct connectivity or Road Side Unit-based data transfer among vehicular nodes is responsible for sharing emergency information during critical situations. Multicast routing data dissemination among vehicular nodes is considered to be the potential method of parallel data transfer as they facilitate the option of determining an optimal multicast tree from feasible number of multicast trees established between the source and destinations. This estimation of optimal multicast tree using meta-heuristic techniques is confirmed to improve the throughput and reliability of the network when QoS-based constraints are imposed during multicast routing. An Improved Shuffled Frog-Leaping Algorithm-Based QoS Constrained Multicast Routing (ISFLABMR) is proposed for estimating an optimal multicast tree that confirms effective multi-constrained applied multicast routing between vehicular nodes. ISFLABMR minimizes the cost of transmission to 22% by reducing the number of multicast clusters formed during multicasting through the utilization of local and global-based optimizations. The simulation results of ISFLABMR proveits predominant reduction rate of 24% and 21% in average packet latency and energy consumptions incurred under multicast routing.     

The arrayed-waveguide grating-based single-hop WDM network: an architecture for efficient multicasting

Research on multicasting in single-hop wavelength-division-multiplexing (WDM) networks has so far focused on networks based on the passive star coupler (PSC), a broadcast device. It has been shown that multicasting performance is improved by partitioning multicast transmissions into multiple multicast copies. However, the channel bottleneck of the PSC, which does not allow for spatial wavelength reuse, restricts the multicast performance. We investigate multicasting in a single-hop WDM network that is based on an arrayed-waveguide grating (AWG), a wavelength routing device that allows for spatial wavelength reuse. In our network, optical multicasting is enabled by wavelength-insensitive splitters that are attached to the AWG output ports. Multicasts are partitioned among the splitters and each multicast copy is routed to a different splitter by sending it on a different wavelength. We demonstrate that the spatial wavelength reuse in our network significantly improves the throughput-delay performance for multicast traffic. By means of analysis and simulations, we also demonstrate that, for a typical mix of unicast and multicast traffic, the throughput-delay performance is dramatically increased by transmitting multicast packets concurrently with control information in the reservation medium access control protocol of our AWG-based network.     

On properties of multicast routing trees

In the last several years we witnessed the proliferation of multimedia applications on the Internet. One of the unavoidable techniques to support this type of communication is multicasting. However, even a decade after its initial proposal, multicast is still not widely deployed. One of the reasons is the lack of a solid business model. If the gain and the cost of multicast could be predicted, network operators might be encouraged to deploy multicast on a larger scale. In this paper we propose analytical expressions that could be used to estimate the gain of network‐layer multicast. We show that the theoretical model matches extensive simulation and Internet measurement results remarkably well. Furthermore, we examine the reliability of traceroute data and of traceroutes‐based conclusions. We investigate the node degree distributions in the Internet maps obtained from CAIDA and RIPE and we show the divergency of our results with those obtained by other researchers. We further focus on the analysis of multicast trees based on traceroute data. Only few results have been available on the node degree distribution of multicast routing trees which provided contradictory conclusions. Our results seem to indicate that the node degrees follow power laws only for a large number of multicast users. Copyright © 2005 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Improved heuristics for multicast routing in wireless mesh networks

Multicast is a communication technique that allows a source to transmit data to a set of recipients in an efficient manner. Therefore, the primary objective of a multicast routing protocol would be to minimize number of transmissions to conserve bandwidth. The problem of computing multicast trees with minimal bandwidth consumption is similar to Steiner tree problem and has shown to be NP-complete. So, heuristic based algorithms are suitable to approximate such bandwidth optimal trees. This paper proposes a multicast routing protocol based on minimum number of transmission trees using an heuristic approach. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm offers better performance over existing protocols, even in the worst-case scenario when the set of multicast receivers are sparsely distributed across the network.     

AMRoute: Ad Hoc Multicast Routing Protocol

The Ad hoc Multicast Routing protocol (AMRoute) presents a novel approach for robust IP Multicast in mobile ad hoc networks by exploiting user-multicast trees and dynamic logical cores. It creates a bidirectional, shared tree for data distribution using only group senders and receivers as tree nodes. Unicast tunnels are used as tree links to connect neighbors on the user-multicast tree. Thus, AMRoute does not need to be supported by network nodes that are not interested/capable of multicast, and group state cost is incurred only by group senders and receivers. Also, the use of tunnels as tree links implies that tree structure does not need to change even in case of a dynamic network topology, which reduces the signaling traffic and packet loss. Thus AMRoute does not need to track network dynamics; the underlying unicast protocol is solely responsible for this function. AMRoute does not require a specific unicast routing protocol; therefore, it can operate seamlessly over separate domains with different unicast protocols. Certain tree nodes are designated by AMRoute as logical cores, and are responsible for initiating and managing the signaling component of AMRoute, such as detection of group members and tree setup. Logical cores differ significantly from those in CBT and PIM-SM, since they are not a central point for data distribution and can migrate dynamically among member nodes. Simulation results (using ns-2) demonstrate that AMRoute signaling traffic remains at relatively low level for typical group sizes. The results also indicate that group members receive a high proportion of data multicast by senders, even in the case of a highly dynamic network.