Multicast routing for multimedia collaborative applications

This paper introduces a multicast routing technique that is suitable for multimedia collaborative applications. Typically, the multicast groups for such applications are small and of slow membership dynamics. Moreover, the group members are not assumed to be located in a single domain; rather, they may span a global inter-network. An important requirement for multimedia collaborative applications is the delivery time—a shortest path delivery tree is of a major interest in constructing the multicast tree. Our routing technique constructs a distribution tree per source and it uses explicit membership messages to build and maintain the tree. Thus, it combines the advantages of both broadcast and prune and shared tree techniques; that is, it produces shortest path trees, yet the bandwidth consumed in building and maintaining such trees is minimal. We present a simulation study to compare the performance of our technique against broadcast and prune and shared tree techniques. Results of the simulation show that our technique outperforms previous ones.