An architecture for scalable, efficient, and fast fault-tolerant multicast provisioning

Providing fault tolerance to multicast connections is an important and challenging requirement of future networks. The existing techniques for fault-tolerant multicast can be grouped into on-demand and preplanned approaches. On-demand approaches can have long recovery latency. For faster recovery, preplanned approaches have been developed. However, in this type of approach the overhead cost is generally very high, especially when there is a large number of simultaneous groups in the network. In this paper first we provide an overview of the current multicast fault tolerance method . In add, on, we propose a novel architecture called Aggregated MPLS-Based Fault-Tolerant Multicast (AMFM) for scalable, efficient, and fast fault-tolerant multicast provisioning. AMFM falls in the category of preplanned approaches. Using the concept of aggregated multicast, AMFM facilitates fault tolerance in a very elegant way: it reduces the protection cost significantly; it is scalable to large numbers of groups; and it can also recover from failure in a very fast manner. This article describes the architecture of AMFM and provides a feasibility check from an implementation point of view. We also conduct experiments to evaluate the performance of AMFM and show it can provide fault tolerance in a scalable fashion.