An efficient IP based approach for multicast routing optimisation in multi-homing environments

In this paper we address the optimisation problem of joint intra- and inter-domain multicast routing in multi-homing environments, a topic that has not received much attention until now. Instead of focusing on the traditional Steiner tree based multicast routing optimisation, we consider plain IP based approaches in which routing is controlled through optimised multi-topology-aware IGP/BGP configurations. The benefit is that no dedicated MPLS tunnelling is required for multicast traffic delivery across multiple domains. In this paper we propose a set of heuristic algorithms for the formulated multi-objective optimisation problem considering both intra- and inter-domain operation. Through our simulation experiments, we show that the proposed schemes achieve significant improvement in the relevant performance compared to conventional approaches.