CRAM: cell re-labeling at merge-points for ATM multicast

Many distributed multimedia applications involve data delivery from a source to multiple destinations, the participating nodes forming a multicast group. In the naive solution, separate connections can be established from each source to other group members. However a tree can be established for each source with the participants as the leaf nodes or just have one tree spanning all the participants. In this paper, we introduce a data forwarding model to support such shared multicast trees over the ATM networks called CRAM (cell re-labeling at merge-points for ATM multicast). Our work allows VC merging in the MPLS architecture and supports recently proposed wide area multicast protocols (like CBT and PIM) in ATM networks.