QoS-aware multicast protocol using bounded flooding (QMBF) technique

Many multicast applications, such as video-on-demand and tele-education have quality of service (QoS) requirements from the underlying network. Recently, many QoS-based multicast protocols have been proposed to meet these requirements. However, few of them can achieve high success ratios. We propose a new QoS-based multicast protocol, QoS-aware multicast protocol using bounded flooding (QMBF) technique. Every network node has local network cell topology information as well as QoS state information. The QMBF utilizes this information to increase the chance of finding the feasible branch. It is based on two methods to find a feasible branch - computing out partial feasible branches using local network cell information (collected from bounded flooding messages) and multiple path searching. The design of QMBF allows it to operate on top of any unicast routing protocol or cooperate with a QoS-based unicast routing protocol.