Ring-based ordering for multipoint-to-multipoint communications

Multipoint-to-multipoint applications will represent a significant part of added value services for the future Internet, Network and Converged Network service providers. These services need, in addition to reliability and high bandwidth availability, a set of specific requirements such as message ordering. In this paper, we examine two ring-based ordering methods for IP multicasting and show that one of them is significantly better than the other. We give some new mathematical formulations for multicast ring construction that globally maximize the profit of the service provider. We consider two connection approaches: 1) a shared ring in which all accepted multicast groups are connected by a single ring, and 2) specific rings in which each accepted multicast group is connected on a separate ring. We propose in each case an algorithm to compute the optimal ring topology and we show by simulation that the Specific ring approach is more efficient, up to 4 times more, when the network size increases.