DISTRIBUTED MULTICAST ROUTING IN POINT-TO-POINT NETWORKS

A new mechanism for effectively routing packets from a source to multi ple destinations in large point-to-point communication networks is pre sented in this article. As there is no central node with the complete knowledge of network topology, and therefore conventional Steiner tree algorithms can not be used, the need for a distributed approach emerg es where each node is supposed to know only the topology of its vicini ty. A distributed algorithm based on the cheapest insertion heuristics is proposed in this article. Simulation results have shown that the e fficiency of the proposed distributed algorithm is practically identic al to that of the distributed Kou-Markowsky-Berman algorithm, whereas it substantially surpasses DKMB as regards time complexity. (C) 1997 E lsevier Science Ltd.