Multipoint connection routeing

Abstract

AbstractAmong other potential services envisioned for broadband ISDN networks, multipoint connnection services have drawn much attention from the standards arena as well as research communities. These services include conference calls, video lectures, etc. where more than two endpoint CPEs are involved in communication. In this paper we investigate representative multipoint connection routeing algorithms from a number of viewpoints: computational complexity, call set‐up complexity, dynamic reconfiguration, robustness to node failures and bandwidth efficiency. These algorithms are either known in the literature or a simple generalization of point‐to‐point routeing algorithms. An interesting conclusion of our study is that the use of multiple point‐to‐point connections for multipoint calls is a viable solution in many cases of interest. This solution would eliminate much of the additional call‐handling complexity that may be otherwise introduced by more sophisticated multipoint routeing algorithms.