Algorithms for Finding Maximum Reliability Many-to-Many Multicast Routing under a Fixed Topology

Abstract

As we all know, many-to-many multicast routing can be extensively used in computer or communication networks supporting various continuous multimedia applications. Here, we are concerned with the case where each user is both a sender and a receiver of messages in multicasting as well as a terminal. In this case, the multicast tree appears as a terminal Steiner tree (TeST). The problem of finding a TeST with a quality-of-service (QoS) optimization is typically NP-hard. By investigation, we discover that we can use an idea of under a fixed topology to find a good many-to-many multicast tree. In this paper, we propose the maximum reliability many-to-many multicast tree under a fixed topology problem (MRMP) in an unreliable network, distributed into two types, the centralized and decentralized. This paper devises a dynamic programming algorithm respectively for constructing an exact solution of the centralized and decentralized MRMP.