Performance evaluation of Source-Specific Multicast routing protocols for IP networks

This paper presents the performance evaluation of two Source Specific Multicast (SSM) protocols for IP networks: Protocol Independent Multicast (PIM) SSM and Lightweight PIM (LPIM). PIM SSM provides reliable, low latency IP Multicast transport services, but at the cost of high overhead in the signalling plane. The main design objective of LPIM is to improve PIM SSM scalability and to provide global deployment capabilities. Lightweight PIM significantly reduces the volume of generated signalling messages, the number of active timers and the total overhead related to timers handling. The protocol is also capable of supporting, when necessary, Internet-wide transmissions that rely on unicast tunnelling.