Bandwidth-delay constrained least cost multicast routing for multimedia communication

Abstract

A new meta-heuristic algorithm is proposed for constructing multicast trees in real-time multimedia applications such that satisfies two important Quality of Service (QoS) constraints. The QoS based multicast routing problem is a known NP-complete problem that depends on (1) bounded end-to-end delay and link bandwidth along the paths from the source to each destination, and (2) minimum cost of the multicast tree. We evaluate the performance and efficiency of the proposed method with a modified version of the BSMA algorithm which is the best known deterministic heuristic algorithm to delay-constrained multicast problem. Simulation results reveal that the proposed algorithm can achieve a smaller average tree costs than modified BSMA with a much smaller running time for relatively large networks. © 2008 Springer-Verlag.