Modeling the multicast address allocation problem

To support IP multicast, domains must assign a unique multicast address to each application from a limited, globally-shared address space. We examine the performance of several classes of address allocation algorithms within the context of the MASC architecture. This study is the first of its kind to model the generalized multicast address allocation problem and consider non-contiguous allocation algorithms. We find that prefix-based allocation outperforms our non-contiguous algorithm, despite the apparent advantages of non-contiguous allocation. We also verify the benefit of using worst-fit for new allocations.