Dual-homing multicast protection

We propose a novel multicast protection scheme based on a dual-homing architecture where each destination host is connected to two edge routers. Under such an architecture, the two paths from the source of the multicast session to the two edge routers provide certain protection for the data traffic from the source to the destination host. Two problems are associated with the proposed dual-homing multicast protection scheme. One is to calculate the individual survivability for a destination host that is connected to two edge routers. The other is to assign two edge routers for each destination host such that the total survivability is maximized for the multicast session subject to the port number constraint of edge routers. We propose an optimal algorithm to solve the first problem and a heuristic algorithm to solve the second problem. Through simulations, we show that the proposed heuristic algorithm achieves a performance close to the calculated lower bound.