This paper presents a study of our proposed architecture for the setup of a MultiPoint-to-MultiPoint (MP2MP) Label Switched Path (LSP). This form of LSP is needed for establishing uni-directional multicast shared trees. Such trees are required for information distribution in applications such as video conferencing. The presented architecture is intended for multicast applications within a single autonomous domain and can be extended to cover inter-domain multicast sessions.

We propose the use of one (or more) control points in the network called Rendez-vous Points (RP) in a simple extention of the PIM-SM protocol to implement multicast in MPLS networks. This architecture has the advantage of using existing MPLS techniques and existing routing protocols and requires only the addition of more management capabilities at the RPs.

The experiments we carried out show that while retaining the advantages of using MPLS over traditional multicast routing, the performance of the new architecture is comparable to that of IP multicast in terms of the volume of control messages and label and memory consumption. Also the architecture scales well with the increase of the number of senders within a multicast group and with the increase of the number of multicast groups.