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 multicas t routing in many multimedia applications: optimal network cost and bounded delay, The network cost of a tree is defined as the sum of tbe cost of all links in the tree. The bounded delay of a routing tree refers to the featu re that the accumulated delay from the source to any destination along the tree shall not exceed a prespecified hound. This paper presents a distribut ed heuristic algorithm which generates routing trees having a suboptimal ne twork cost under the delay bound constraint. The proposed algorithm is full y distributed, efficient in terms of the number of messages and convergence time, and flexible in dynamic membership changes. A large amount of simula tions have been done to show the network cost of the routing trees generate d by our algorithm is similar to, or even better than, other existing algor ithms.