MPLS Multicast Traffic Engineering

In this paper, we present multicast traffic engineering and we compare it to unicast traffic engineering. We study the advantages given by the integration of multicasting and MPLS. We present current proposals for multicast traffic engineering and using MPLS network. We describe our approach, the MPLS multicast tree (MMT) protocol. In order to reduce forwarding states and enhance scalability, MMT utilizes MPLS LSPs between branching routers of the multicast tree. We present a simulator for MMT and finally we discuss some simulation results.