A case for scalable multicast tree migration

The proliferation of QoS-aware group applications coupled with the limited availability of network resources demands efficient mechanisms to support QoS multicasting. During a life-cycle of a multicast session, three important events can occur: membership dynamics, network dynamics, and traffic dynamics. The first two are concerned with maintaining a good quality (cost) multicast tree taking into account dynamic join/leave of members, and changes in network topology due to link/node failures/additions, respectively. The third aspect is concerned with flow, congestion, and error control. There have been many solutions proposed for dealing with each of these issues. However, the issue of tree migration has not been addressed as part of these solutions. In this paper, we highlight the importance of tree migration as a mechanism for handling membership and network dynamics in core-based I multicasting, prove that it is NP-complete, and propose four heuristic algorithms for it. The proposed algorithms are evaluated under two performance metrics: service disruption and resource wastage. Our simulation studies show that two of the algorithms offer comparable performance to that of the other two, in addition to being highly scalable and easily implementable