An Architecture for Multicast Routing Protocol Support in MPLS

MPLS (Multiprotocol Label Switching) technology is the solution to the performance requirements of the next generation IP core networks. Unfortunately, the existing architecture for MPLS ignores multicast support. Besides, the existing solutions cover a limited scope in supporting multicast services in MPLS. In this paper, we propose a general architecture to support all IP multicast routing protocols in an MPLS environment. Current multicast routing proposals for MPLS use a separate label for each branch of the multicast tree. In contrast, our architecture called GAM (General Architecture for Multicasting in MPLS) uses a unique Tree Label (TL) to identify a multicast tree. The architecture requires smaller MFT (Multicast Forwarding Table) sizes at each LSR as a result.