Multicast Routing Simulation in the Ring Network: A Prototyping Study

The multicast technology has emerged as a dominant and critical technique for the e-commerce applications to best and effectively utilize the networks bandwidth. By proper allocation of the networks bandwidth, the multicast communication among a group of nodes can be deployed with certain optimal criteria. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of multicast transmission within a bi-directional ring networks. As has been widely known, the ring topology is popularly used in the LAN/MAN (Local/Metropolitan Area Networks.) Hence, this study is important and dedicated to the performance improvement of multicast transmission within the existing LAN/MAN. Given a set of multicast groups, our objective is to design a bandwidth allocation strategy for packet transmission that has the minimum traffic congestion. Since the multicast transmission problem in the ring networks was proven as a NP-complete problem, we have formulated this problem as an Integer Linear Program (ILP) and proposed a heuristic algorithm to obtain certain approximate solutions. The numerical results indicate that our heuristic algorithm generally provides certain of near optimal-solution comparing to another optimal solution solved by ILP. Keyword:Multicast Group, Multicast Routing Path, Maximum Flow, ILP (Integer Linear Programming), Objective Function.