Centralized Control and Management Architecture Design for PIM-SM Based IP/MPLS Multicast Networks

In this paper, we propose a centralized control and management (CCM) architecture to support PIM-SM multicast protocol in IP/MPLS network. With the integration of IP and MPLS multicast routing mechanism, we justify that CCM framework can improve multicast capabilities such as dynamic group management, control algorithm for multicast routing and resource reservation. Most current schemes for multicast routing assume that multicast routers participate above mentioned functions as well as data forwarding. Since multicast suffers from control overhead by increasing group size, the multicast router must keep large amount of states for point-to-multipoint (p2mp) routing. In additions, the dynamic member join/leave will increase the complexity of control and management for multicast router. By separating data flow and control flow, and by centralizing control and management plane, we design a distinct CCM architecture for PIM-SM based multicast routing in IP/MPLS network. We present the procedural algorithm for the multicast functionality of CCM including call admission, resource reservation, multicast tree calculation and dynamic group management. Compared to source specific and shared multicast routing, the centralized approach can alleviate the burden of multicast routers. To explain the scalability and efficiency for the proposed CCM architecture, we evaluate and discuss the QoS multicast routing for receiver-initiated multicast tree structure.