The evaluation of the quality of multicast routing algorithms in packet networks

The increase in the popularity of multimedia streaming services is followed by a rapid increase in network traffic. This phenomenon is a serious challenge for network services providers. Multicast technology seems to be a promising technology for multimedia services. Contrary to unicast, it uses a single data stream, thus leading to a substantial reduction in network traffic through a construction of a multicast distribution tree. In literature we can find many protocols and algorithms designed for such trees, but the discussion on multicast efficiency and optimization still poses a challenge and remains an open question. In this paper, the authors propose a suitable efficiency validation technique and evaluate representative unconstrained multicast routing algorithms such us KMB, DDMC, PPH, STA and, additionally, the simple shortest path tree (SPT) algorithm used by the PIM protocols. The authors present how the distribution tree optimization influences network resource consumption. The simulation studies have been performed for different network parameters such as: the number of network nodes, number of multicast nodes, different multicast nodes arrangement, etc.