Intra- and inter-domain multicast routing protocols: A survey and taxonomy

A multicast routing protocol should be scalable, robust, use minimal network overhead, consume minimal memory resources, inter-operate with other multicast routing protocols, and be easy to implement. The mechanism used to manage the multicast group (participants join and leave throughout the multicast session) is an important issue when designing a protocol for multicast routing. Other design choices are influenced by the distribution of the participants over the routing domain (sparse or dense), the role of the participants in the group (source, receiver, or both), the number of groups and participants per group, and the requirements of the participants in terms of transmission delay. In this study a taxonomy of IP multicast routing protocols for dynamic groups will be presented. This taxonomy will be used to classify a surveyed set of intra- and inter-domain multicast routing protocols and to discuss successful protocol design regarding satisfaction of the multicast application´s latency requirements as well as the network´s resource consumption requirements.