Efficient management of multicast communications in mission-critical networks

Increasing efficient use of resources, such as network bandwidth, battery life and processing power, is one of the most important challenges in multicast group design for mission-critical networks. In this paper, we present an efficient technique for multicast group planning in a mission-critical network. Our technique increases the number of transmission links shared by any two users in a shortest-path multicast tree while keeping the unwanted traffic received by users within acceptable limits. We conduct simulation experiments which show that the multicast group assignments from our approach significantly increase bandwidth efficiency of multicasting.