VNS-RP algorithm for RP selection in multicast routing protocol PIM-SM

Covering both theoretical and practical interest in different networks layers, multicast routing remains an important topic. In network layer, there are several multicast routing protocols using different multicast routing trees in the literature. However PIM-SM and CBT protocols remains the most used multicast routing protocols; they propose using a shared tree (ST). This kind of tree provides efficient management of multicast path in changing group memberships, scalability and performance. The main problem concerning the construction of a shared tree is to determine the best position of the root. Selection of the core (in CBT protocol) or Rendezvous Point RP (in PIM-SM protocol) affects directly both structure of multicast tree and routing scheme performances of multicast session accordingly. This paper proposes a multicast RP selection algorithm based on VNS search. This algorithm selects the RP router with systematic change of arbitrarily chosen neighborhoods by considering both cost and delay functions. Simulation results show that good performance is achieved in terms of multicast cost, end-to-end delay, tree construction delay and others metrics.