Multicast Routing and Bandwidth Dimensioning in Overlay Networks

Multicast services can be provided either as a basic network service or as an application-layer service. Higher level multicast implementations often provide more sophisticated features, and can provide multicast services at places where no network layer support is available. Overlay multicast networks offer an intermediate option, potentially combining the flexibility and advanced features of application layer multicast with the greater efficiency of network layer multicast. This paper introduces the multicast routing problem specific to the overlay network environment and the related capacity assignment problem for overlay network planning. The main contributions are the design of several routing algorithms that optimize the end-to-end delay and the interface bandwidth usage at the multicast service nodes within the overlay network.