Linkcast: Fast and scalable multicast routing protocol

Abstract

The current multicast routing protocols require state maintenance in the on-tree routers in order to forward multicast packet properly. Therefore, the routers memory may be easily saturated when there are very large number of low to moderate size multicast groups. In contrast, the explicit multicast protocols offer a stateless design using header space of multicast data packets. In this paper, we introduce new stateless scheme called Linkcast that efficiently eliminates processing overhead of explicit multicast protocols like Xcast. The Linkcast represents the multicast tree by encoding its counterpart links. Simulation results show that Linkcast completely eradicates the required unicast lookups in explicit multicast protocols with less header size overhead. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2001.