A QoS-Aware Multicast Routing Protocol - INFOCOM 2000. Nineteenth Annual Joint Conference of the IEEE Computer and Communications Societies

The future Internet is expected to support multicast applications with quality of service (QoS) requirements. To facilitate this, QoS multicast routing protocols are pivotal in enabling new receivers to join a multicast group. However, current routing protocols are either too restrictive in their search for a feasible path between a new receiver and the multicast tree, or burden the network with excessive overhead. We propose QMRP, a new Qos-aware Multicast Routing Protocol. QMRP achieves scalability by signiflcantly reducing the communication overhead of constructing a multicast tree, yet it retains a high chance of success. This is achieved by switching between single-path routing and multiple-path muting according to the current network conditions. The high level design of QMRP makes it operable on top of any unicast routing algorithm in both intra-domain and inter-domain. Its responsiveness is improved by using a termination mechanism which detects the failure as well as the success of routing without the use of timeout. In addition, QMRP always constructs loopfree multicast trees.