QoS support poses new challenges to multicast routing especially for inter-domain multicast where network QoS characteristics
will not be readily available as in intra-domain multicast. Several existing proposals attempt to build QoS-sensitive multicast
trees by providing multiple joining paths for a new member using a flooding-based search strategy which has the draw-back
of excessive overhead and may not be able to determine which join path is QoS feasible sometimes. In this paper, first we
propose a method to propagate QoS information in bidirectional multicast trees to enable better QoS-aware path selection decisions.
We then propose an alternative ‘join point’ search strategy that would introduce much less control overhead utilizing the
root-based feature of the MASC/BGMP inter-domain multicast architecture. Simulation results show that this strategy is as
effective as flooding-based search strategy in finding alternative join points for a new member but with much less overhead.
We also discuss extensions to BGMP to incorporate our strategies to enable QoS support.
This work was supported in part by grants from Cisco Systems and NSF.