QoS multicast aggregation under multiple additive constraints

IP Multicast has been proposed in order to manage group communications over the Internet in a bandwidth efficient manner. Although such a proposition has been well studied, there are still some inherent problems for its widespread deployment. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm coined mQMA that deals with the two main problems of traditional IP multicast, i.e., multicast forwarding state scalability and multi-constrained QoS routing. The algorithm mQMA is a QoS multicast aggregation algorithm which handles multiple additive QoS constraints. It builds few trees and maintains few forwarding states for the groups thanks to the technique of multicast tree aggregation, which allows several groups to share the same delivery tree. Moreover, the algorithm mQMA builds trees satisfying multiple additive QoS constraints. We show via extensive simulations that mQMA reduces dramatically the number of trees to be maintained and reduces the utilization of the network resources, yet it leverages the same overall QoS performances as Mamcra which is the main known multi-constrained multicast routing algorithm.