Multicast routing in ATM network

It is expected that when B-ISDN is implemented, a large portion of the traffic will be occupied by various multicast services, including broadcast. Among the services that are expected to emerge in the future, such as minibroadcasts and specialized broadcasts, each station has few listeners, with the number varying with time. Thus, dynamic multicast routing is required. As another point, in the ATM network that provides the basis for B-ISDN, VP is provided as a network, and routing must be executed considering the VP environment. This article proposes a direct VP limiting algorithm that controls the use of VP and evaluates the performance when the algorithm is applied to the ATM network. It is found that the proposed algorithm is suitable when the physical network has nonhierarchical configuration, while the static routing suffices when the network has a hierarchical configuration.