Video distribution on multicast networks

The Internet is being used to distribute video programming to small, widely distributed audiences over a multicast backbone (Mbone). This type of service can be used to deliver specialized programming to the general population. As the service becomes more widely used, conserving the required transmission facilities becomes more important. We define the problem of designing multicast networks for video distribution. The problem is related to the Steiner tree problem, with an interesting twist. The line costs are not constant. An heuristic is developed to solve the problem and the new heuristic is related to and compared with heuristics, developed for the Steiner tree problem and algorithms to design minimum depth and minimum spanning trees.