Domain Constrained Multicast: A New Approach for IP Multicast Routing

One of major reasons why IP multicast has not been well deployed is the complexity of IP multicast routing. Since existing IP multicast routing protocols have been designed independently of IP unicast routing protocols, a router must maintain routing tables for both IP mutlicast and unicast routing. This is, in particular, a big burden for an inter-domain router. In addition, by using existing IP multicast routing protocols, we cannot realize an application that a sending host outside the designated domain sends IP multicast packets only towards the designated domain. To resolve above issues, we propose a new architecture for IP multicast, which is called Domain Constrained Multicast (DCM). In this architecture, IP multicast packets are forwarded to a border router of the designated domain using IP unicast routing. And then, IP multicast packets are delivered inside the designated domain using IP multicast. We propose an address format when realizing the DCM architecture using IPv6. We describe the extension of the DCM architecture for applying it to inter-domain IP multicast routing. Finally, we have compared the DCM architecture for inter-domain routing, with existing inter-domain IP multicast routing protocols such as MSDP and BGMP.