A SIGNALING FRAMEWORK FOR HYBRID MULTICAST TREES

This paper proposes a management framework that allows enhanced signaling capabilities offering tight control over the construction and maintenance of multicast hybrid trees in IP communications. Hybrid trees are composed of native IP multicast trees inter-connected by unicast Overlay Trees. Inline with Future Internet architectures, that add powerful management entities, the proposed framework divides the computation and installation of the multicast trees in several layers, increasing the scalability and providing flexibility in the sense that, customized trees can be established on demand, conforming to the needs of the Service Provider which uses these trees for media flow distribution.