On finding feasible solutions for the delay constrained group multicast routing problem

Group multicasting is a generalization of multicasting whereby every member of a group is allowed to multicast messages to other members that belong to the same group. In this paper, we study the problem of finding feasible solutions for the delay constrained group multicast routing problem (DCGMRP). The routing problem in this case involves the construction of a set of delay bounded multicast trees with bandwidth requirements, one for each member of the group, for multicasting messages to other members of the group. We first show that the problem is NP-complete. Next, we propose a heuristic algorithm to find feasible solutions for this problem. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm is able to achieve a high probability of finding feasible solutions for DCGMRP, whenever one exists.