An MPLS broadcast mechanism and its extension for dense-mode multicast support

Due to the increasing multicast applications and high desire for its deployment, it seems that any new technology should support multicast. However; MPLS technology which enhances IP packet forwarding capability by using layer 2 switching still does not offer any special solution for multicast support. The main difficulty in supporting dense-mode multicast protocols like DVMRP and PIM-DM is lack of a broadcast mechanism in MPLS. We propose a genuine broadcast mechanism for MPLS in this paper. First, the proposed mechanism is based on a central broadcast label assigner called BLAC (Broadcast Label Assignment Center). Then, we propose a new dense-mode multicast protocol for MPLS as an extension to our broadcast mechanism. Our method consumes fewer labels compared to the existing proposals supporting dense-mode multicast groups and has smaller forwarding tables.