Near receiver branching point multicast protocol

Many multicast routing protocols construct SPTs (shortest path trees) to deliver multicast data packets to the receivers with the minimum delay. Some protocols, on the other hand, try to minimize the bandwidth consumption in the multicast distribution tree using Steiner trees. In this paper, we propose a new multicast routing protocol called NRBP (near receiver branching point) which can construct a wide range of multicast distribution trees between these two extremes. Changing the protocol parameters controls the tree characteristics. Our protocol is not only able to build SPT with minimum total tree cost, but also it can create semi-Steiner tree with less data delivery delay. Benefits of the proposed protocol include some sort of congestion avoidance, controlling the MFT (multicast forwarding table) memory requirements and QoS provisioning.