Content area
Applications that benefit from multicast data transmission over an IP network, such as video-based Over The Top (OTT) applications and content distribution, are constantly developing and growing. Thus, there is a high demand for multicast services in the telecommunications service provider’s network. These networks, which transport residential and corporate telecommunications services, are usually high-availability and high-capacity networks based on IP/MPLS network technology. In this context, the problem that the network deals with is the service provider’s ability to distribute multicast traffic, often in real time, from multiple services in a scalable, reliable manner and, in many cases, with quality of service guarantees. This paper aims to present an analysis of IP multicast traffic transport techniques in virtual private networks (MVPN) over an IP/MPLS network infrastructure. The focus of the paper is on techniques based on the BGP protocol, where a new method is being standardized by the IETF. This new IETF draft is based on the BGP EVPN protocol and describes procedures that allow optimal routing of IP multicast traffic between different LANs of a given customer. To perform the analysis, a laboratory experiment was conducted to compare two methods: a standard already known and implemented by the industry (NG-MVPN) and this new method that is still in draft or proposed for standardization, Optimized Inter-Subnet Multicast (OISM). The laboratory environment consists of network emulation software, virtualized Nokia routers, tools for data capture and statistical analysis of the results. For this analysis, a study was conducted to compare the protocol performance in the control plane of these two MVPN methods in IP/MPLS networks. The results of the experiments indicate that the MVPN technique based on EVPN presented improvements, compared to NG-MVPN, in control plane communication for establishing the MVPN service.