Low-Cost ATM Multicast Routing with Constrained Delays

An increasing number of networking applications involve mul tiple participants and are therefore best supported by multicasting Where a multicast application consumes high bandwidth it is important to min imise the e ect on the network by o ering economical multicast routes Many new applications made possible by networks based on ATM in volve real time components and are therefore also delay sensitive This paper discusses reasonably simple techniques for multicast routing which tackle both of these constraints that is rst the route makes e cient use of network resources and secondly delays to all recipients are kept within a bound The problem is NP complete so we present heuristics which build up a directed graph containing potential routing solutions and use a greedy approach to select a solution from that graph The heuristics are discussed and evaluated and are shown to o er good re sults for a variety of situations including both large and small multicast groups Our approach is also compared with a previous solution to this problem which has a greater time complexity