Evaluation for a multicast extension of a label switching technology

Abstract

AbstractThe LSR (label switch router), which uses label switching technology, performs packet transmission by a label transmission module that uses fixed‐length labels, in addition to by an ordinary network transmission module. It realizes high‐speed and high‐performance packet transmission by making correspondence with IP packets and fixed‐length labels, and by transmitting them using the label transmission module. The basic part of unicast label distribution protocol used by LSR has been specified by IETF (Internet Engineering Task Force). As for multicast label switching technology, various protocols (FANP [5], TAG [7], IPSOFACT [11]) have been proposed, and they have been compared by Ooms and colleagues [13]. However, there has been no study that evaluated the effectiveness of multicast label switching technology by comparing two cases, one that uses label switching technology for multicast packet transmission and another that does not. In this article, we evaluate the effectiveness of multicast label switching technology by designing and implementing FANP, a protocol for multicast label switching, by measuring LSP setup time, which is overhead of LSR compared with ordinary routers, and by measuring throughput for the case with label switching technology and for the case without it. LSP setup time was about 40 ms per LSR, which shows that overhead of label switching technology is small. Also, we verified that the throughput is higher when we used the label switching technology than when we did not use it, and it is effective in routers that reproduce multicast packets, such as backbone routers with many multicast receivers. © 2004 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Electron Comm Jpn Pt 1, 87(7): 66–74, 2004; Published online in Wiley InterScience (www.interscience.wiley.com). DOI 10.1002/ecja.1189