Alternate Path Routing for Multicast

Current network-layer multicast routing protocols build multicast trees based only on hop count and policy. If a tree cannot meet application requirements, the receivers have no alternative. In this paper, we propose a general and modular architecture that integrates alternate path routing with the network's multicast services. This enables individual multicast receivers to reroute a multicast tree according to their needs, subject to policy restrictions. Our design focuses on the two primary components of this architecture - a loop-free path installation protocol and a scalable, distributed path computation algorithm. Based on a simulation study, we demonstrate that using alternate path routing enables receivers to find acceptable paths nearly as well as a link-state protocol, with much lower overhead. We also show that our approach scales to large networks and that performance improves as a multicast group grows in size.