Performance evaluation of center search algorithms used for dynamic rendezvous-point relocation

The protocol independent multicast - sparse mode (PIM-SM) is a multicast routing protocol that uses one center (which we refer to as the rendezvous point ¿RP¿) for all transmitters in a multicast group. It builds source-specific trees to the transmitters whose data rates exceed a defined threshold. Investigations are done to improve and provide an efficient mechanism for switching between the shared-based mode and source-based mode. Another attractive solution investigated in the literature is the dynamic relocation of the RP depending on the transmitters or the members of the multicast group. In this paper, we propose three search algorithms used to find the optimum RP position. To evaluate the performance of these algorithms, two objective functions are used. The Hill-Climbing algorithm and the standard PIM-SM protocol with static RP-selection are used as a reference for comparison. Our dynamic RP-relocation algorithms result in a lower network load compared to the static RP-selection algorithm. However, they need additional control messages.