PDMRP: a programmable distributed multicast routing protocol

One of the most critical task for group communications lies in the establishment of multicast trees on the network. Two famous multicast trees are the shortest path-based trees and the Steiner-based trees. The former is suitable for those applications (such as video conferences) which wish to have a low propagation delay between the source (chairman site) to each of the receivers (member sites). The latter is well-suited for those (such as VoD services) which tend to consume as small as possible network resources (bandwidth). So far the routers have to implement separate routing protocols in order to support the construction of different kinds of multicast trees. This paper proposes a programmable distributed multicast routing protocol (PDMRP) for the routers so that different multicast trees can be established easily by only tuning a cost parameter.