CRAM: Cell Re-labeling At Merge-points for ATM multicast

Many distributed multimedia applications involve data delivery from a source to multiple destinations, the participating nodes forming a multicast group. In the naive solution, separate connections can be established from each source to other group members. However, a tree can be established for each source with the participants as the leaf nodes or just have one tree spanning all the participants. In this paper, we introduce a data forwarding model to support such shared multicast trees over the ATM networks called CRAM (Cell Re-labeling At Merge-points for ATM multicast). Our work allows VC merging in the MPLS architecture and supports recently proposed wide area multicast protocols (like CBT and PIM) in ATM networks. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.