Traffic engineered multicast content delivery without MPLS overlay

Multicast traffic engineering (TE) has recently attracted significant attention given the emergence of point-to-multipoint multimedia content delivery over the Internet. Existing multicast resource provisioning solutions tend to use explicit-routing based TE with multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) tunnels. In this paper, we shift away from this overlay approach and address native IP multicast traffic engineering based on link state routing protocols. The objective is that, through plain Protocol Independent Multicast-Sparse Mode (PIM-SM) shortest path routing with optimized multitopology IGF (MT-IGP) link weights, the resulting multicast trees are geared towards minimal consumption of bandwidth resources. We apply genetic algorithms (GA) to the calculation of optimized MT-IGP link weights that specifically cater for engineered PIM-SM routing with statistical bandwidth guarantees in multimedia content delivery. Our evaluation results show that GA-based multicast traffic engineering consumes significantly less bandwidth in comparison to conventional IP approaches while also exhibiting higher service availability.