BMP: an efficient and scalable multicast protocol

It is well known that IP multicast suffers from a deployment problem. To solve the problem, many alternative group communication methods like application layer multicast and branching point (BP) based multicast have been proposed. Among them, BP based approaches have many invaluable features like incremental deployment, low memory requirement and hence high scalability. We propose a new BP based method called BMP (branching based multicast protocol) which aims to solve the existing problems with previous methods. Unlike other BP based proposals, the BMP packet forwarding method has very little impact on unicast packet forwarding. In addition, BMP avoids packet duplications in other BP based approaches which occurs in the presence of network asymmetry,.