Qos routing mechanisms for multicast tree stability

Several large-scale distributed applications exploiting multicast communication require reliable delivery of data to all participants. In addition, scalability, throughput stability, efficient loss recovery and buffer management are essential communication properties in large-scale settings. In this paper, we first analyze, the instability factors and their results in the multicast infrastructure, and then analyze the solutions leading to stability in switched networks. Subsequently, we propose a solution to the above routing problem, where the route computation is based on the actual load on the network links. We propose a fast and simple heuristic algorithm named the Cost-Delay Shortest Path (CDSP) algorithm, which attempts to strike a balance between the different QoS parameters. The CDSP algorithm is based on a simple path exponential selection function taking simultaneously both the cost and delay into consideration and allowing the network load to be distributed in an optimal way. Our extensive simulation results showed that our proposed CDSP algorithm outperforms in many cases the best well-known algorithm DVDMR with a similar low time complexity.