EFFICIENT MULTICASTING IN POINT-TO-POINT NETWORKS

Multicasting is an operation that is frequently needed in networks. The most common technique for multicasting a message is to treat the operation as multiple unicast operations. This approach does not exploit the possibility of using one transmission for multiple destinations. In this paper, we propose some heuristics for efficient multicasting that attempt to reduce network cost. The network cost is defined as the sum of weights of the links in the routing path. We then propose a simulation model to evaluate the performance of these heuristics. The simulation model defines some parameters to characterize a network, and then generates networks that satisfy these parameters. The simulation studies of the average performance of the heuristics reveal that simple and straight forward heuristics, in which nodes decide the routing entirely from local information, perform surprisingly well in terms of network cost.