Efficient Internet Multicast Routing Using Anycast Path Selection

A novel efficient and dynamic multicast routing protocol based on anycast routing techniques is presented. The contributions of the protocol differ from well-known shared-tree systems in two aspects: (1) Off-tree anycast routing: The nodes in the shared tree are formed into a virtual anycast group and multicast sources use anycast routing to select a better path from the source to one router in the group to achieve short delay and fault-tolerance. (2) On-tree dynamic routing: The shared-tree approach is extended with capability of alternative path selections. If a node becomes absent from the shared tree, some predefined backup path(s) is (are) used to bypass the node and enable dynamic multicast routing to continue. The protocol requires only the routers near the faulty node to be reconfigured, thus reducing the runtime overhead as compared with global reconfiguration. The simulation data demonstrates the efficiency of our routing protocol.