Qualitative Analysis of an Unreliable Hybrid Multicast Protocol (UHMP)

Abstract

Protocol Independent multicast Sparse mode (PIM SM) and Protocol independent multicast Dense Mode (PIM DM) uses a best effort method of propagating data along a multicast distribution tree, but the difference between them is that in PIM SM, leafs interested sends join message to the stud which in turn sends to the Rendezvous Point source (RPS) or source and the distribution tree is created, while in PIM DM the RPS or source sends a flood message to the stub nodes which then forward it to leaf nodes and leaf nodes that are not interested sends a prune message. In the hybrid  multicast protocol (UHMP) being proposed the stub nodes originates the flood message to the leaf and uninterested leaf sends prune message, any stub that has one or more interested leaf sends a join message to the RPS. A simulation model was developed to mimic the behaviour of PIM SM, PIM DM and UHMP in different network size using hierarchical network and the control bandwidth overhead (CBO) for each of the multicast protocols was calculated, the CBO was use as the cost metric. The result shows that the UHMP uses less CBO than PIM DM both in a sparsely and densely populated network. While the differences in CBO usage between UHMP and PIM SM was not noticeable in sparse mode, UHMP however uses less CBO then PIM in a dense mode scenario.