An efficient algorithm for group multicast routing with bandwidth reservation

Multicasting refers to the transmission of data from a source node to multiple destination nodes in a network. Group multicasting is a generalisation of multicasting whereby every member of a group is allowed to multicast messages to other members that belong to the same group. The routing problem in this case involves the construction of a set of low-cost multicast trees with bandwidth requirements, one for each member of the group, for multicasting messages to other members of the group. In this paper we first prove that to find a feasible solution to the group multicast routing problem is NP-complete. Following that we propose a new heuristic algorithm to generate a set of low-cost multicast trees with bandwidth reservation. Simulation results show that our proposed algorithm performs better in terms of cost and utilization of bandwidth compared with an existing algorithm that was proposed by Jia and Wang (1997).