Loop-free multicast routing with end-to-end delay constraint

We study the problem of constructing multicast trees for high-bandwidth delay-sensitive applications in a point-to-point communication network. This problem arises in real time multimedia applications, which often requires a guaranteed bandwidth and bounded end-to-end delay to ensure that the quality of service is met. This problem can be formulated as that of finding a minimum cost steiner tree with bounded end-to-end delay along the paths from source to each destination and is known to be computationally intractable, being NP-complete. In this article, we propose two loop-free routing heuristics for this problem. Loop-freedom is an important consideration in multicasting as loops in multicast routing duplicate looping packets, which in turn consumes additional bandwidths and other network resources. Simulation results show that both algorithms performed better in terms of cost (utilization of bandwidths) against an existing algorithm that was proposed by Kompella et al, without compromising on delay latency and running time. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.