Dynamic multicast routing in VLSI

Abstract

As real-time applications requiring dynamic group communication emerges, existing multicast routing algorithms must be improved to cater for high-speed routing decisions. Most of the reported efficient multicast routing algorithms for real-time applications construct a multicast tree using the Dijkstra's algorithm. However, they require reconstruction of the tree when there are group membership changes or faulty links/nodes in the session. In this paper, a dynamic routing strategy that does not rely on the construction of the multicast tree is presented. It is based on the “clustering technique” and it lends well for VLSI implementation. The Cluster Unit was implemented using VHDL and a suitable architecture for the routing strategy has been proposed. Performance evaluations based on software simulations show that the proposed routing strategy performs better than the most widely used multicast routing algorithm when the number of nodes become large. Moreover, performance comparisons based on the VHDL implementation of the Cluster Unit show that the proposed technique performs significantly better when realised in VLSI.