A fast multicast routing algorithm for delay-sensitive applications

Abstract

We propose a heuristic algorithm for delay-constrained minimum cost multicast routing in packet-switched networks. The algorithm is computationally efficient since, unlike previous heuristics, it does not rely an any enumerative step that generates a set of delay-bounded paths between a pair of nodes and chooses a minimum cost path. An extensive computational experiment is done on wide varieties of instances including relatively large and dense networks. For small and sparse networks, the algorithm can find near-optimal multicast trees. Even when the network size grows, the quality of the multicast tree does not seem to deteriorate while the computation time remains quite moderate.