On the performance and feasibility of multicast core selection heuristics

✍ Scribed by Fleury, Eric; Huang, Yih; McKinley, Philip K.

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2000
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 229 KB
• Volume: 35
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0028-3045
• DOI: 10.1002/(sici)1097-0037(200003)35:2<145::aid-net5>3.0.co;2-m

✦ Synopsis

A core-based forwarding multicast protocol uses a core router as a traffic transit center: All multicast packets are first sent to the core, then distributed to destinations on a multicast tree rooted at the core. The purpose of this paper was to evaluate, via simulation, the effect of various core selection methods on multicast performance. Performance metrics of interest include network resource usage, packet delay, the join time of multicast participants, and link congestion. In addition, we assess the feasibility of these heuristics in realworld environments. The main contribution of this work is the discovery of a simple yet effective core selection heuristic that can be implemented in a wide variety of networks. Specifically, our results show that the tree cen- ter heuristic (using the center of the existing multicast tree as the new core node) significantly outperforms heuristics based on random selection and performs as well as other heuristics that are computationally more expensive.