SYSTEM AND METHOD FOR HIERARCHICAL MULTICAST ROUTING IN ATM NETWORKS

摘要

The present invention extends the PNNI protocols to support hierarchical multicast routing and signaling for ATM networks. The invention utilizes an extension to a core-based tree algorithm. Instead of a single core node, cor e nodes are maintained in each peer-group and at each level of the hierarchy. The ad vantage of this is that one single core node is not overloaded. Additionally, this i ncreases fault-tolerance because there are no single points of failure. As would be u nderstood, the present invention is highly scaleable because of the hierarchical nature of PNNI. In addition, the scheme supports multiple senders and dynamic membership cha ngesto the multicast group. Quality of service requireme nts can be negotiated duringconnection setup and are guaranteed during the c ourse of the connection. Though some additional topological information has to be flooded in the peer-groups to compute efficient multicast routes, the overheads to the connection manageme nt are minimal The multicast tree is built incrementally and the cost of the tree i s comparable to the cost of the Steiner Tree computed using some standard heur istics.