Restricted dynamic Steiner trees for scalable multicast in datagram networks

The paper addresses the issue of minimizing the number of nodes involved in the routing over a multicast tree and in the maintenance of such a tree in a datagram network. It presents a scheme where the tree routing and maintenance burden is laid only upon the source node and the destination nodes associated with the multicast tree. The main concepts behind this scheme is to view each multicast tree as a collection of unicast paths, and to locate only the multicast source and destination nodes on the junctions of their multicast tree. The paper shows that despite of this restriction, the cost of the created multicast trees is not necessarily higher than the cost of the trees created by other algorithms that do not impose the restriction and therefore require all the nodes along the data path of a tree to participate in the routing over the tree and in the maintenance of the tree