Overlay Multicast Routing Supported by IP Multicast Routers

We propose TOMIMN as a novel overlay multicast approach, which exploits the support from IP multicast routers to construct a topology-aware overlay tree. Compared with most overlay multicast schemes, TOMIMN tree is compatible with the physical network and effective in saving bandwidth resource. Due to the network layer support, no complicated algorithm is needed to adjust the overlay topology in response to membership changes. On the other hand, TOMIMN tree can cover members in unicast domains, which don't support IP Multicast routing. By simulations, we show that TOMIMN draws a good balance between traditional overlay and IP multicast approaches.