CRAM: Cell re-labeling at merge-points for ATM multicast

Many distributed multimedia applications involve data delivery from a sourc e to multiple destinations, the participating nodes forming a multicast gro up. In the naive solution, separate connections can be established from eac h source to other group members. However, a tree can be established for eac h source with the participants as the leaf nodes or just have one tree span ning all the participants. In this paper, we introduce a data forwarding mo del to support such shared multicast trees over the ATM networks called CRA M (Cell Re-labeling At Merge-points for ATM multicast). Our work allows VC merging in the MPLS architecture and supports recently proposed wide area m ulticast protocols (like CBT and PIM) in ATM networks.