Abstract:The emergence of distributed multimedia applications such as teleconferencing, remote education and distributed interactive simulation etc. prompts the importance of multicast services. The QoS (quality of service) requirements of these applications drive the development of QoS-aware multicast routing. Recently, many QoS-aware multicast protocols have been proposed to meet these requirements. However, few of them can achieve high success ratio, high scalability, and low control message overhead. A new QoS-ware multicast routing protocol is proposed based on bounded flooding technique. It aims at alleviating the memory overhead of routers for setting up multicast trees and improving scalability of the protocol. In this scheme, every node has a two-level forwarding table which contains information about its immediate neighbors (routers reachable in one hop) and its second-degree neighbors (neighbors of an immediate one). By the information about the second-degree neighbors, a router can forward Join_Probe messages intelligently instead of blindly flooding them. This protocol also utilizes multi-path searching to increase the probability of finding feasible branches while connecting a new node to the multicast tree. The details of the data structures in the protocol and the algorithm of building a distribution tree are described. It demonstrates the effectiveness of the proposed protocol through simulation which evaluates its performance in terms of ACAR (average call acceptance ratio) and ACMO (average control message overhead).