Quantization of Sparse and Dense Mode Protocols in Ring Topology Networks

This paper provides analytical tools to assess the improvements of existing, modified or entirely new multicast protocols at an early stage of design. In particular, we investigate the general properties of sparse mode (SM) and dense mode (DM) protocols and their variants. Specifically, we quantify the performance of these protocols in a ring topology network using control bandwidth overhead (CBO) as cost metric. Our cost models are designed using combinatorial and restricted partitioning techniques. We compared our results with exhaustive enumeration technique and found that when p>0.4 (p is the probability that a router is part of a multicast group), DM with state refresh (DMSR) mechanism appeared relatively superior to SM and DM with flood and prune (DMFP) mechanism. Also studied is the precise measure of the relative performance between SM and source specific multicast (SSM) protocols.