TOMIMN: A Fusion of Overlay and IP Multicast

Abstract

Overlay multicast has attracted an increasing attention in recent years due to its low requirements for the underlying network as well as its high flexibility in the implementation. However, most protocols of this category encounter some common issues, which are hard to address without the network layer support. In this paper, we investigate a novel overlay multicast routing protocol named TOMIMN, which exploits existing functions of multicast routers to retrieve important topological information from the network core. By overlay multicasting, TOMIMN overcomes shortcomings of the traditional IP multicast technique. On the other hand, since most routers support IP multicast today, TOMIMN requires little change to the current Internet infrastructure. Compared with other approaches, TOMIMN possesses a high efficiency in the overlay construction and reduces the control overhead to a large extent.