MESCAL has investigated both management and control plane mechanisms and algorithms for scalable multicast support of QoS service differentiation and traffic engineering in point-to-multipoint communications.

In the management plane, we have addressed the issue of multicast service level specification (mSLS) design and implementation. We have proposed an efficient multicast TE scheme for optimal utilisation of network resources with constrained bandwidth capacity. In order to avoid the complexity and scalability issues in setting up LSPs, our proposed approach adopts a plain IP based TE strategy rather than an MPLS-based strategy. Through simulation experiments, we have found that the IP based TE performance is very close to the MPLS-based solutions that involve setting up dedicated LSPs. In addition, we have also considered inter-domain multicast traffic engineering without MPLS support. For this, the basic idea is to apply hot potato routing (HPR) to influence the ingress point selection of individual group sources.

In the control plane, we have also addressed multicast mechanisms, basically for the purpose of supporting QoS heterogeneity in multicast applications. The proposed mechanism is based on source specific multicast (SSM), which has been regarded as a promising solution for multicast service deployment across the Internet. In order to achieve effective service differentiation, we adopt using separate multicast trees for each QoS class per group session. Moreover, by encoding QoS class information through SSM group address, no extra complexities are introduced for the development of DiffServ aware multicast.

Further reading:

N. Wang, G. Pavlou, "Bandwidth Constrained IP Multicast Traffic Engineering Without MPLS Overlay," Proc. IEEE/IFIP Int. Conference on Management of Multimedia Networks & Services (MMNS'04), San Diego, U.S.A., October 2004. [link]

N. Wang, and G. Pavlou "An Overlay Framework for Provisioning Differentiated Services in Source Specific Multicast", Computer Networks Journal, Elsevier Science, Vol. 44, No. 4, pp. 481-497, March 2004. [link]

MESCAL deliverable D1.3, "Final specification of protocols and algorithms for inter-domain SLS management and traffic engineering for QoS-based IP service delivery", Chapter 13. [link]

MESCAL deliverable D3.2, "Final experimental results: validation and performance assessment of algorithms and protocols for inter-domain QoS through service-driven traffic engineering", Chapter 3, section 3.4. [link]