A distributed multicast routing algorithm for real-time applications in wide area networks

Abstract

The problem of constructing a minimal cost multicast routing tree (MRT) with delay constraints in wide area networks (WAN) is considered. A new distributed token-passing based algorithm that constructs a sub-optimal MRT satisfying given delay constraints for all members in the multicast group is presented. In contrast with the previous works by Jia [A distributed algorithm of delay-bounded multicast routing for multimedia applications in wide area networks, IEEE/ACM Trans. Network. 6 (1998) 828–837] and several others [Y. Im, Y. Lee, S. Wi, Y. Choi, Delay constrained distributed multicast routing algorithm, Comput. Comm. 20 (1997) 60–66; X. Jia, Y. Zhang, N. Pissinou, K. Makki, A distributed multicast routing protocol for real-time multicast applications, Comput. Networks 31 (1999) 101–110; Q. Sun, H. Langendorfer, A distributed delay-constrained dynamic multicast routing algorithm, Telecommun. Systems 11 (1999) 47–58], in which cycles may occur, we show that the multicast routing network produced by our algorithm is indeed a tree, namely, cycle free. Also the success rate of our algorithm to find a feasible solution, if one exists, is guaranteed to be 100%, while Jia's algorithm is not. Furthermore, our algorithm is fault tolerant and can also adapt to cases where the multicast group members are allowed to join or leave the multicast session dynamically. Simulations have been conducted and the results show that the MRT generated by our algorithm has better performance compared to previous methods.