The multicast MPLS tree construction protocol: Evaluation, simulation and implementation

In this paper, we study multicast tree construction in MPLS network. We discuss the difficulty in combining multicast and MPLS in a network. We describe some MPLS proposals for the multicast traffic and we justify the need for defining a new protocol. Thereafter we propose MMT, the MPLS Multicast Tree protocol, which uses MPLS LSP (Label switched Path) between multicast tree branching nodes in order to reduce the multicast routing states in routers and to increase scalability. We present improvements to MMT protocol and we evaluate it in term of scalability. We present simulation results to validate our evaluation. Finally, we describe the MMT protocol implementation under Linux which is an experimentation in seen of a standardization.