A hierarchical IP/MPLS wide area multicast architecture

Multicast has been widely accepted as the effective scheme to deal with multimedia services. For wide area multicast, it is unavoidable to have communication among several administrative domains. At this time, the fact that different multicast routing policies are adopted in different domains becomes a serious problem. Current multicast architecture does not have enough scalability and is not suitable for the whole Internet. In this paper, we present a hierarchical IP/MPLS multicast architecture which can solve this problem. Inter-domain routing mechanism and label aggregation algorithm are proposed to support this method. We compare global IP multicast architecture with our hierarchical IP/MPLS method architecture and demonstrate that the performance penalty for the hierarchical organization of multicast is small. At the same time, it enables the composition of different administrative networks, each with its own independent multicast protocol and administrative policy. It is also scalable and flexible for both the service providers and multicast users to adopt multicast services by using their networks.