A REAL-TIME MULTICAST ROUTING ALGORITHM FOR MULTIMEDIA APPLICATIONS

Multicast routing in real-time applications has two important requirem ents: minimal network cost and shortest network delay. It is very diff icult to meet one requirement without compromising the other. This pap er presents a real-time multicast routing algorithm which minimizes ov erall network cost without letting the delay from a source to any dest ination exceed a real-time constraint. The multicast routing with opti mal overall network cost is an NP-complete problem. Our algorithm is b ased on the idea of the minimum spanning tree heuristic. Simulations h ave been done to compare the routing generated by our algorithm with t hose by other major algorithms. (C) 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.