A distributed algorithm of delay-bounded multicast routing for multimedia applications in wide area networks

Multicast routing is to find a tree which is rooted from a source node and contains all multicast destinations. There are two requirements of multicast routing in many multimedia applications: optimal network cost and bounded delay. The network cost of a tree is defined as the sum of the cost of all links in the tree. The bounded delay of a routing tree refers to the feature that the accumulated delay from the source to any destination along the tree shall not exceed a prespecified bound. This paper presents a distributed heuristic algorithm which generates routing trees having a suboptimal network cost under the delay bound constraint. The proposed algorithm is fully distributed, efficient in terms of the number of messages and convergence time, and flexible in dynamic membership changes. A large amount of simulations have been done to show the network cost of the routing trees generated by our algorithm is similar to, or even better than, other existing algorithms.