Efficient heuristic for minimum cost trees construction in multi-groups multicast

Abstract

We propose an efficient and fast heuristic algorithm (MGST) to construct minimum cost tree for each multicast-group in multi-groups multicast. The idea is to construct just one spanning shared-tree that allows minimum cost tree of each multicast-group to be computed from this shared-tree. MGST is compared with the low overheads Core-Based Tree algorithm (CBT) and approximate optimal cost Minimum Cost Tree heuristic (MCT) through simulations. The results showed that MGST constructs trees with average cost close to the approximate optimal (7% difference). The overheads incurred from MGST are also comparable to CBT and much lesser than MCT. In addition, MGST has also shown to construct minimum cost trees much faster than MCT and comparable to CBT.To further improve the performance, "trace back" method is introduced to MGST and denoted as MGST-T. MGST-T yields average cost performance of only 2% difference from the optimal and with almost the same overheads and trees' construction time as MGST. © 2008 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.