ARCHITECTURE FOR DENSE MULTICAST NETWORKS WITH PROVISIONED ROUTES

摘要

A multicasting network route provisioning system (Fig.2) for use in allowing an in-session multicast application (40) to switch its path on need includes a datastore of multicast addresses operable to route multicasting traffic over different network paths. It also includes a datastore of multicasting sessions (20, 22, 24) having flows of various flow patterns, wherein a flow pattern is defined in terms of a set of source and destination network nodes, and corresponds to multiple routing network paths. Further, a session management module (18) is adapted to aggregate multicasting session flows by allocating multicast addresses to multicasting sessions based on correspondence between the network paths and flow patterns of the multicasting sessions, thereby ensuring that flow patterns corresponding to different sets of network paths do not share a same multicast address.