A distributed multicast routing algorithm for delay-sensitive applications

We present a distributed multicast algorithm for constructing minimum-cost multicast trees with delay constraints. The proposed algorithm, which provides multicasting and guaranteed end-to-end delay bound at the network layer; is also designed to find a reduced-cost routing tree. The proposed algorithm requires limited network state information and the routing tree is computed through a single round of message exchanges between network nodes. We prove the algorithm's correctness by showing that it is always capable of constructing a delay-constrained multicast tree, if one exists. The algorithm is verified by simulation and it is shown that it exhibits superior performance compared to the existing ones for the tree cost measure.