Delivering Multicast Services over MPLS Infrastructure

The exponential growth in Internet technology has challenged service providers to provide multicast based services like broadcast TV, video on demand and streaming music services over the broadband access infrastructure to their end clients. To meet these requirements, service providers are making use of multi-protocol label switching (MPLS) to better provision and support these bandwidth demanding applications for their end clients. This article presents a performance analysis for the transport of multicast services across MPLS infrastructure networks. Multicast flows are carried using virtual private LAN services (VPLS) as transport media. We further investigate the reliability of multicasting over VPLS and compare it with PIM interms of jitter and delay experimentally using our optical networks research lab (ONRL) testbed.