Design and Performance Analysis of Dynamic Compact Multicast Routing

Recently introduced by Abraham et. al, compact multicast routing algorithms construct point-to-multipoint routing paths from any source to any set of destinations. The present paper introduces a different approach by proposing a name-independent compact multicast routing algorithm that is leaf-initiated, fully distributed, and independent from the underlying unicast routing. By means of the proposed routing scheme, resulting multicast distribution trees dynamically evolve according to the arrival of leaf-initiated join/leave requests. We provide the theoretical performance bounds of the proposed algorithm in terms of stretch of point-to-multipoint routing paths it produces, size and number of routing table entries, and communication/messaging cost. Next, we evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm by simulation on synthetic power-law graphs (modeling the Internet topology) and the CAIDA map of the Internet topology. We also compare its performance to legacy multicast routing algorithms (the Shortest Path Tree and the Steiner Tree algorithm). Keywords-component; multicast, compact rouring