Fast rerouting for IP multicast in managed IPTV networks

Recent deployment of IP based multimedia distribution, especially broadcast TV distribution has increased the importance of simple and fast restoration during IP network failures for service providers. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a simple but efficient method for fast rerouting of IP multicast traffic during link failures in managed IPTV networks. More specifically, we devise an algorithm for tuning IP link weights so that the multicast routing path and the unicast routing path between any two routers are failure disjoint, allowing us to use unicast IP encapsulation for undelivered multicast packets during link failures. We demonstrate that, our method can be realized with minor modification to the current multicast routing protocol (PIM-SM). We run our prototype implementation in Emulab which shows our method yields to good performance.