Performance Study and Deployment Strategies on the Sender-Initiated Multicast

Although IP Multicast offers efficient data delivery for large group communications, the most critical issue delaying widespread deployment of IP Multicast is the scalability of multicast forwarding state as the number of multicast groups increases. Sender-Initiated Multicast (SIM) was proposed as an alternative multicast forwarding scheme for small group communications with incremental deployment capability. The key feature of SIM is in its Preset mode with the automatic SIM tunneling function, which maintaining forwarding information states only on the branching routers. To demonstrate how SIM increases scalability with respect to the number of groups, in this paper we evaluate the proposed protocol both through simulations and real experiments. As from the network operator’s point of view, the bandwidth consumption, memory requirements on state-and-signaling per session in routers, and the processing overhead are considered as evaluation parameters. Finally, we investigated the strategies for incremental deployment. key words: routing, multicast, small group communication, forwarding states reduction