Computer Communication Networks Multicast Routing Algorithm

The recent emergence of multimedia communication and collaborative work in distributed environments provides an incentive to system designers to include communication support for these applications. A prevalent pattern in such environments is multicast (one-to-many or many-to-many) communication. Routing is one of the key problems to multicast communication. The objective of multicast routing optimization is to minimize the network cost with delay constrained. Finding a multicast routing tree with minimized network cost is known to be an NP-Complete problem in the most general case. The existing heuristics have high time complexity. The heuristics with simple, easy and distributed implementations are under research. Up to now, there is no balanced method between optimization of network cost and delay yet. In this paper, a concept of intergate optimization of multicast routing is put forward,in which both network cost and delay are optimized in a certain degree. Optimization of the network cost can reduce network resources consumed by communication, while optimization of the delay can reduce the delay from source to receivers. An edge selection function is also put forward,which can accomplish integrated optimization of multicast routing. There was never an algorithm that had the same performance before. An parameter is set in the algorithm, which can adjust optimization level between optimization of network cost and optimization of network delay. The algorithm is simulated in many random network models,and is proved that it has better performance than existing heuristics. This algorithm has low time complexity,and can also be implemented easily and in distributed fashion.