QoS-sensitive routing for Real-time Multicasting

Multicast service with Quality of Service (QoS) guarantees is critical to commercial and real-time applications , such as telemedicine, video-conferencing, and virtual reality. The Internet is currently in the process of developing QoS architectures (e.g., Int-serv, Dii-serv) to support such applications. However, most multicast protocols, such as PIM and CBT, do not employ QoS-sensitive routing: they do not consider the QoS requirements of the user in computing the route. In this paper , we discuss the importance of QoS-sensitive routing for the support of real-time multicast applications. We show that the QoS-sensitive routing can improve the end-to-end performance signiicantly, in some cases almost tripling the number of satissed users. In addition , existing work shows that the QoS-sensitive routing for multicast can be implemented stably, eeciently and scalably. Therefore, we conclude that QoS-sensitive multicast routing should be considered in commercial networks.