Scheme of active hierarchical multicast routing

Many applications need IP multicast. In order to support large-scale multicast applications in Internet, effective multicast routing is crucial. These multicast routing protocols must possess efficacy, scalability and incremental deployment capability. But the existing multicast routing protocols are performance insensitive and cannot deal with traffic load balancing and congestion-oriented routing. Many multicast routing protocols not only take charge of data forwarding but also participate in routing control algorithms, which results in more complexity for routers. Furthermore, large-scale deployment of these multicast routing protocols in Internet is a manual, costly process. In this paper, the authors present a novel Active Hierarchical Multicast Routing scheme (AHMR) based on active network technologies by separating data forwarding and routing control protocol. Based on link-state protocol, it uses active packet to set up multicast routing as an efficient, automatically upgrading routing scheme for large-scale multicast applications in Internet. The architecture, control protocol, the proof of its correctness and its advantages over other schemes are demonstrated.