A minimum cost multicast routing algorithm with the consideration of dynamic user membership

Abstract

In this paper, we attempt to solve the problem of constructing a minimum cost multicast tree with the consideration of dynamic user membership. Unlike the other minimum cost multicast tree algorithms, this problem consists of one multicast group of fixed members and each destination member is dynamic and has a probability of being active as which was gathered by observation over some period of time. With the omission of node join/leave handling, this model is suitable for prediction and planning purpose than for online maintenance of multicast trees. We formally model this problem as an optimization problem and apply the Lagrangean relaxation method and the subgradient method to solve the problem. Computational experiments are performed on regular networks and random networks. According to the experiment results, the Lagrangean based heuristic can achieve up to 37.69% improvement compared to the simple heuristic. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2005.