SoMR: A scalable distributed QoS multicast routing protocol

Many Internet multicast applications such as teleconferencing and remote diagnosis have Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements. The requirements can be additive (end-to-end delay), multiplicative (loss rate), or of a bottleneck nature (bandwidth). Given such diverse requirements, it is a challenging task to build QoS-constrained multicast trees in a large network where no global network state is available. This paper proposes a scalable QoS multicast routing protocol (SoMR) that supports all three QoS requirement types. SoMR is scalable due to small communication overhead. It achieves favorable tradeoff between routing performance and routing overhead by carefully selecting the network sub-graph in which it searches for a path that can support the QoS requirements. The scope of search is automatically tuned based on the current network conditions. An early-warning mechanism helps detect and route around the long-delay paths in the network. The operations of SoMR are completely decentralized. They rely only on the local state stored at each router.