Abstract

The increasing interest in distributed applications like multimedia and collaborative work calls for efficient means to support multicast communication. A fundamental issue in multicast communication is route selection, usually based on trees. We present a destinationdriven algorithm that optimizes for applications, such as group video- or tele-conferencing, that require multicast trees with low total cost. The destination-driven algorithm uses a greedy strategy based on shortest-path trees and minimal spanning trees but biases routes through destinations. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed through extensive simulation and compared with several Steiner tree heuristics and the popular shortest-path tree (SPT) method. The algorithm is found to produce trees with significantly lower overall cost than the SPT while maintaining reasonable per-destination performance. Its performance is also shown to compare well with other well-known Steiner heuristics. Moreover, the algorithm do...

Citations