Unicast Extension Multicast Protocol for Forwarding Entry Reduction and Source Mobility Support

摘要

IP multicast is seen as an efficient way of encouraging multimedia services such as Internet TV and Videoconferencing because it can deliver packets to multiple users while efficiently using network resources. Source Specific Multicast (SSM) is suggested as the IP multicast routing protocol and it can construct multicast trees efficiently. However it increases multicast forwarding table entries and fails to handle source mobility. This paper proposes the Unicast Extension Multicast Protocol (UMP) to solve these problems. In the protocol, only the routers that act as branching points keep multicast forwarding table entries, and packets are delivered between these routers using IP unicast. This prevents the multicast forwarding table entries from burdening other non-branch routers. Additionally, UMP supports source mobility by using the recursive join messages to prevent the creation of redundant paths while supporting source mobility.