Hierarchically Distributed PCE for Flexible Multicast Traffic Engineering

The IPTV service, in which high-capacity content is broadcast from the IPTV server to a huge number of users, is becoming very popular. To establish an effective IPTV network, we need to minimize the cost of the IPTV multicast tree. That tree consists of a node, to which an IPTV server is connected, as the root node and other nodes, to which users are connected. In addition, we have to consider users who belong to multiple network domains. In this paper, we apply hierarchically distributed path computation elements (HDPCEs) to cooperatively create appropriate IPTV trees for multidomain users. Each HDPCE shares the burden of creating a multidomain multicast tree. Thus, we can reduce the computational burdens of creating a multicast tree. In addition, we enable choosing three different algorithms to create the cheapest multicast trees in individual domains. One of them is a new multiplex-aware-route- selection (MARS) algorithm. We evaluated the applicability of the three algorithms to various types of domains depending on network conditions.