A new scheme for MPLS supporting IP multicast and its validation

MPLS that combines the flexibility of Layer3 routing with QoS supporting of Layer2 switching is being widely developed. Unfortunately, existing MPLS specification can only support unicast well, but is lack of supporting multicast. The main difficulty of MPLS supporting multicast is the binding labels to multicast FEC. This paper mainly presents a new scheme that MPLS supports IP multicast routing protocol. In the proposed mechanism, the label distribution is triggered by traffic and not by control messages. This scheme makes the network's scalability and dynamic characteristic better than the scheme whose label distribution is triggered by control messages. The simulation results validate that this scheme can work well both in normal network and in the condition of higher link-loss-rate.