A Self‐Adaptive Load Balanced Internet Multicast Routing Protocol

Abstract The prevailing Internet has brought many novel network applications. These applications often involve the interactions among multiple members in a single session. For example, the images and voices of the lecturer in distance learning must be transmitted to multiple destinations at the same time on demand. The status and opinions of any participant should also be transmitted to each other in a video conferencing for the interactivity of conversations. Without suitable protocol supports from the underlying networks, these applications may be costly and infeasible. One of the important protocol supports is the capability of multicasting, sending a single data packet to a set of receivers that are members of a multicast group. In the past, there are four well‐known Internet multicast routing protocols: DVMRP (Distance Vector Multicast Routing Protocol), MOSPF (Multicast extensions to Open Shortest Path First), CBT (Core‐Based Tree), and PIM (Protocol Independent Multicast). In this paper, based on PIM, we propose a new multicast routing protocol called SEAL‐PIM (SElf‐Adaptive and Load balanced PIM). The new protocol reduces the PIM message and resource overhead and balances the traffic load in the network by rearranging the links of routing and the locations of the group rendezvous points to adapt to the current distribution of group members. Finally, simulations are done to compare our algorithm with the original PIM scheme. The results indicate that the performance improvement is good.