A protocol for scalable loop-free multicast routing

Abstract
In network multimedia applications such as multiparty teleconferencing, users often need to send the same information to several (but not necessarily all) other users. To manage such one-to-many or many-to-many communication efficiently in wide-area internetworks, it is imperative to support and perform multicast routing. Multicast routing sends a single copy of a message from a source to multiple receivers over a communication link that is shared by the paths to the receivers. Loop-freedom is an especially important consideration in multicasting because applications using multicasting tend to be multimedia and bandwidth intensive, and loops in multicast routing duplicate looping packets. We present and verify a new multicast routing protocol, called multicast Internet protocol (MIP), which offers a simple and flexible approach to constructing both group-shared and shortest-paths multicast trees. MIP can be sender-initiated or receiver-initiated or both; therefore, it can be tailored to the particular nature of an application's group dynamics and size. MIP is independent of the underlying unicast routing algorithms used. MIP is robust and adapts under dynamic network conditions (topology or link cost changes) to maintain loop-free multicast routing. Under stable network conditions, MIP has no maintenance or control message overhead. We prove that MIP is loop-free at every instant, and that it is deadlock-free and obtains multicast routing trees within a finite time after the occurrence of an arbitrary sequence of topology or unicast changes.

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