Cost, Delay, and Delay Variation Conscious Multicast Routing

We consider a constrained Steiner tree problem in which it is necessary to provide bounded delays between the source and all destinations, as well as bounded variation among these delays. The delay and delay variation bounds are directly related to the quality of service requirements of real-time interactive applications that will use the tree for multicast communication. The main contribution of our work is a new strategy for constructing constrained multicast trees. We present a heuristic that exhibits good average case behavior for the maximum delay variation among the destinations while keeping the overall cost of the multicast tree low. Our heuristic compares favorably with existing multicast algorithms in terms of tree cosst, system running time, and the satisfaction of the delay and delay variation constraints.