Multicast Routing for Multimedia Applications

Abstract

Due to new techniques of Internet, many novel multimedia applications have emerged. These applications include video on demand (VOD), video/audio phone, distance learning, interactive games, etc. These are two major characteristics of these applications. On is the use of group communication. The other is the requirement of more network bandwidth and quality of service guarantee. As a consequence, whether the underlying routing protocols can provide efficient multicast service and quality of service guarantee becomes a very important issue. In this paper, we study many performance issues of routing multimedia applications using existing Internet multicast routing protocols. Our numerical results show that the routing performance can be improved by careful core placement, appropriate link cost function, and multiple multicast trees routing.