A new approach to multicasting and QoS within an MPLS backbone

Abstract

Multicasting techniques can be applied to facilitate applications such as video conference-calls and multimedia distribution. Multicasting enhances network utilization by containing traffic to network segments that are part of the multicast tree only. This prevents network segments that are not part of the multicast tree to be flooded with unwanted traffic. In addition, multicasting prevents redundancy by copying packets destined for multiple downstream receivers at branching routers. Reservation protocol (RSVP) guarantees QoS for real-time applications and has the ability to achieve fairness across applications. An extension to RSVP called RSVP-traffic engineering (RSVP-TE) is proposed, which enables RSVP PATH and RESV messages to setup traffic engineered label switched paths (LSP). By adding multicast operations to RSVP-TE, point to multi-point LSPs can be created and this effectively enables multicasting within the MPLS domain. In this paper we present multicasting and QoS within a MPLS backbone (MQM) and an extension to the network simulator (NS-2), that shows the advantages of combining multicasting and RSVP-TE within an MPLS domain