The Overlay Multicast Protocol (OMP): A Proposed Solution to Improving Scalability of Multicasting in MPLS Networks

With the increasing emergence of group communication applications, and the need for more efficient usage of network resources, multicast techniques and protocols are becoming more vital in networks, and thus need to be given more attention. Multicasting refers to the ability to send information to several receivers at the same time. IP multicast and overlay multicast are two well known approaches that provide multicast services. Several limitations found in IP multicast are addressed in overlay multicast. However, implementation of multicast on MPLS still suffers from IP multicast limitations. This paper proposes a new protocol: the overlay multicast protocol (OMP), in which the overlay approach is applied on MPLS networks to improve the scalability of multicasting. The detailed operations of OMP are explained and a simulation study is presented. The results show the improvement in performance when using OMP.