Integrating routing and resource reservation mechanisms in real-time multicast protocols

Multimedia applications must incorporate real-time task processing over networks. In most cases, there are many receivers for each data stream. Thus, a multicast resource reservation protocol for ensuring timing constraints over the network is required. In this paper, a real-time multicast protocol, called RtMP (Real-time Multicast Protocol) is presented. RtMP provides flexible connection establishment by integrating the multicast routing mechanism and the resource reservation mechanism by defining a generic interface between them. RtMP also provides a mechanism that guarantees service level of established connections according to the sender list. An implementation of RtMP on the real-time OS RT-Mach is also described along with performance evaluation. Finally, a comparison of RtMP with other real-time multicast protocols is given and its efficiency is shown.