A SOURCE BASED MULTICAST ROUTING ALGORITHM WITH DELAY VARIATION CONSTRAINT

Abstract

Mechanisms to support multicast communication are becoming an increasingly important component of the high speed networks. The most popular solution for multicast routing is tree construction. In this dissertation, the problem of constructing multicast trees to meet the quality of service requirements of real-time interactive applications operating in high speed packet switched environments is studied. It was assumed that multicast communication depends on 1) bounded delay along the paths from the source to each destination and 2) bounded variation among the delays along these paths. A heuristic that demonstrates good average case behaviour in terms of the maximum interdestination delay variation is presented. The heuristic achieves its best performance under conditions typical to multicast scenario in high speed networks. It also shows that it is possible to dynamically reorganize the initial tree in response to changes in the destination set, in a way that is minimally disruptive to the multicast session.