Efficient Heuristic for Multicasting in Arbitrary Networks

Multicast is a communication model in which a message is sent from a source to an arbitrary number of distinct destinations. Two main parameters that are used to evaluate multicast routing are the time it takes to deliver the message to all destinations and the traffic, i.e., the total number of links involved in the multicast process. It has been proved that finding an optimal multicast solution on both time and traffic is NP-hard. We propose a heuristic for the multicasting problem in an arbitrary network. We performed extensive simulations on for pure random network topologies and two types of N-Level Hierarchical topologies. We tested our heuristic against a random algorithm for multicasting and we present comparative results.