Dynamic multicast routing in advance resource reservation environment

Since network resources are usually limited, the ability to carry out resource reservation in advance, as well as efficient dynamic multicasting when destination nodes can join and leave the group during the communication period, are essential in all distributed multi-party applications. Total or partial re-routing of a multicast tree for dynamic multicast groups can optimize the tree cost to some extent but they are complex. Furthermore, optimal multicast routing has been proved to be an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we propose an efficient dynamic multicast routing algorithm, which optimizes the total cost of the Steiner tree over the whole session period in an advance resource reservation environment, where information about the resource reservation (i.e. leaving times of participants at the time of joining) are available. The efficiency of our algorithm compared to other existing algorithms is shown by various simulation results