Distributed routing for dynamic multicasting with advance resource reservation information

One important requirement in many multimedia applications is optimal network cost, which is defined as the sum of the cost of all links in the tree. Total or partial re-routing of the multicast tree for dynamic multicast groups can optimize the tree cost to some extent. But they are complex as cell-ordering at ATM switches has to be preserved. Furthermore, optimal multicast routing (also known as Steiner tree) has been proved to be an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose a heuristic distributed dynamic multicast routing algorithm, which optimize the total cost of the Steiner tree over the whole session period in an advance resource reservation environment, where information about the resource reservation (i.e. joining and leaving times of participants) are available at the time of joining. The efficiency of our algorithm and comparison with other existing algorithms is shown by various simulation results.