A Delay-Constrained Least-Cost Multicast Routing Heuristic for Dynamic Multicast Groups

Many new multimedia applications involve dynamic multiple participants, have stringent end-to-end delay requirement and consume large amount of network resources. In this paper, we propose a new dynamic delay-constrained least-cost multicast routing algorithm (DDCLCMR) to support these applications. When group membership changes, the existing multicast tree is perturbed as little as possible. Simulation results show that DDCLCMR performs very well in terms of cost for both, static and dynamic multicast groups, when compared to the best multicast algorithms known. Our evaluation of the cost performance of the algorithms showed that DDCLCMR is always within 10% from BSMA which has the best cost performance among all the proposed delay-constrained static multicast heuristics, while NAIVE, the well-known dynamic multicast routing algorithm, is up to 70% worse than BSMA in some cases.