A distributed low-cost dynamic multicast routing algorithm with delay constraints

Many real-time multimedia applications such as distance education, video conferencing have stringent end-to-end delay requirement and consume large amounts of network resources. In order to support these applications efficiently, multicast routing algorithms are needed for computing the least cost multicast trees that satisfy a given end-to-end delay constraint. However, finding such a tree is known to be computationally expensive. Therefore, we propose a heuristic distributed multicast routing algorithm that satisfies a given end-to-end delay constraint and minimizes the average resulting tree cost. Also, simulation results show that the proposed algorithm has better average cost performance than the other existing algorithms.