On the performance and feasibility of multicast core selection heuristics

A core-based forwarding multicast protocol uses a core router as a traffic transit center: all multicast packets are first sent to the core, then distributed to destinations on a multicast tree rooted at the core. The purpose of this paper is to evaluate, via simulation, the effect of various core selection methods on multicast performance. The main contribution of this work is the discovery of a simple yet effective core selection heuristic that can be implemented in a wide range of networks. Specifically, our results show that the tree center heuristic (using the center of the existing multicast tree as the new core node) significantly outperforms heuristics based on random selection, and performs as well as heuristics that are more computationally expensive.