A novel extension of Kruskal's algorithm in multicast routing

Multimedia applications are expected to guarantee end-to-end quality of service (QoS) and are characterized by stringent constraints on delay, delay-jitter, bandwidth, cost, etc. In the litterature, we observe that Kruskal's algorithm is limited to minimal (maximal) spanning unconstrained tree. In this paper, we extend Kruskal's algorithm to incorporate the delay bound constraint. Consequently, we propose a novel algorithm, called EKRUS (Extended Kruskal), for constructing multicast trees. The EKRUS' distinguishing features consists in a better management of Kruskal's priority queues, and in the provision of edge priority aggregation. Preliminary results show that our proposed EKRUS algorithm performs as good as the best well-known algorithms (such as the DDMC, DMCTc algorithms) while exhibiting better complexity. Furthermore, we believe that EKRUS is well suited to actual implementation in networks requiring support for multicast communication.