Multicast routing algorithms for computer network

Abstract

The computer networks are also being used to send information in the form of data streams or packets to a selective, usually large number of users or destinations. These networks are experiencing explosive growth due to the advances in optical fiber and switch technologies. These networks are being used for various distributed multimedia applications such as audio/video-conferencing, remote education, E-commerce, software delivery, games, telephony, virtual whiteboard, etc. The applications such as video/audio conferencing are delay-sensitive whereas the applications such as interactive gaming are bandwidth-intensive. The factors, such as explosive growth of computer networks, users and variety of resource intensive networked applications, require efficient routing algorithms for optimizing the utilization of network resources. The multicast is a technique used to facilitate the information exchange by routing data from one or more sources to a potentially large number of destinations such that overall utilization of resources is minimized in some sense. For efficient multicasting, a tree is constructed, where due to the presence of smart switches; data traverses the link only once. The resource intensive applications have a wide diversity of Quality of Service (QoS) requirements for data transfer. The commonly used QoS measures are cost, bandwidth, end-to-end delay, delay jitter, packet loss ratio and hop count, etc. The QoS based routing aims at transferring information simultaneously from one or more sources (or senders) to a group of destinations (or receivers), namely the multicast group, by optimizing objective(s) while satisfying a set of QoS constraints. A solution to the QoS multicast routing problem is to build a multicast tree, Steiner tree, which spans from the source node to all destinations. The diverse QoS requirements make the routing problem intractable and NP-complete. The computation complexity increases in searching a tree for certain combinations of QoS requirements.