QoS-aware multicast routing for the Internet: the design and evaluation of QoSMIC

One of the main problems of the current Internet infrastructure is its inability to provide services at consistent quality-of-service (QoS) levels. At the same time, many emerging Internet applications, such as teleeducation, and teleconferencing, require multicast protocols that will provide the necessary QoS. In this paper, we propose QoSMIC, a multicast routing protocol for the Internet, that provides QoS-sensitive paths in a scalable, resource-efficient, and flexible way. QoSMIC differs from the previous protocols in that it identifies multiple paths and selects the one that can provide the required QoS. Two other key advantages of QoSMIC are its flexibility and adaptivity. First, the distribution tree does not have to be rooted at a preselected core router. Second, we can tradeoff between efficiency metrics depending on our needs; for example, we can tradeoff routing efficiency for a reduction in the control messages. Extensive simulations show that our protocol improves the resources utilization and the end-to-end performance compared to the current protocols. Specifically, our protocol reduces the call blocking probability by a factor of six and reduces the end-to-end delay by as much as 90% compared to the PIM protocol.