A DISTRIBUTED DELAY CONSTRAIN MULTICAST ROUTING PROTOCOL

Abstract

Multicasting is the ability of a communication network to accept a single message from an application at one node (source node) and deliver copies of the message to multiple destinations. For multicasting it is needed to establish a routing tree which is rooted at the source node and contains all the multicast destinations. In real-time applications it is required that the accumulated delay from the source node to any destination along the tree does not exceed a pre-specified time bound. Such a routing tree is called delay bounded routing tree. This dissertation presents a distributed routing protocol, which constructs delay-bounded routing tree for delay constrained (real-time) multicast connections. The proposed protocol considers cost and delay as separate variables on each link of the network unlike the previously given algorithms in which both delay and cost are represented by a single variable. The routing tree constructed by this algorithm has near optimal network cost under the delay constraint. Further, the proposed protocol is distributed, efficient in the number of messages required and flexible in multicast membership changes.