mQMA: Multi-Constrained QoS Multicast Aggregation

Traditional IP multicast has been proposed in order to manage group communications over the Internet in a bandwidth efficient manner. Although this proposition has been well studied, there are still some problems for its deployment. In this paper, we propose a new algorithm mQMA that deals with two important problems of traditional IP multicast, i.e., multicast forwarding state scalability and multi-constrained QoS routing. The algorithm mQMA builds few trees and maintains few forwarding states for the groups thanks to the technique of multicast tree aggregation, which allows several groups to share the same delivery tree. Moreover, the algorithm mQMA builds trees satisfying multiple QoS constraints. We show, trough extensive simulations, that mQMA leverages the same QoS performances as Mamcra which is the main multi-constrained multicast routing algorithm. Moreover, mQMA reduces dramatically the number of trees to be maintained.