A capacitated minimum-cost multicast routing algorithm for multirate multimedia distribution

In this paper, we attempt to solve the problem of min-cost multicast routing for multirate multimedia distribution in a capacitated network. More specifically, for (i) a given network topology (ii) a given link capacity (iii) the destinations of a multicast group and (iv) the bandwidth requirement of each destination, we attempt to find a feasible routing solution to minimize the cost of a multicast tree for multirate multimedia distribution. This problem has been proved to be NP-hard. First, we model this problem as an optimization problem, which is a linear programming problem. Then, we propose a simple heuristic algorithm and an optimization based heuristic to solve this problem. Computational experiments have been performed on regular networks, random networks, and scale-free networks.