A distributed multicast routing protocol for real-time multicast applications

Multicast routing is establishing a tree which is rooted from the source no de and contains all the multicast destinations. A delay bounded routing tre e is a tree in which the accumulated delay from the source node to any dest ination along the tree does not exceed a pre-specified bound. This paper pr esents a distributed routing protocol which constructs delay bounded routin g trees for real-time multicast connections. A constructed routing tree has a near optimal network cost under the delay bound constraint. The proposed algorithm is fully distributed, efficient in terms of the number of messag es required, and flexible in multicast membership changes. A large number o f simulations have been done to show the network cost of the routing trees generated by our method is better than the other major existing algorithms. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.