Network Planning for Multicast Using Partitioned Virtual User Domains

We introduce a new network planning approach for management of multicast communications in large data dissemination networks. Our approach, addressing Channelization Problem, considers both the common user interests and geographical dependencies while evaluating multicast configurations. We first perform Global Similarity Classificationto partition users into virtual domains based on their characteristics within the same geographical vicinity. Second, based on the resource availability of a given network, Localized Multicast Updatemechanism is used to evaluate the benefits of forming a new multicast group and the cost of the management overhead. We evaluate the performance of the proposed approach using our simulation software. Preliminary results show that, using two-stage planning, the performance of our approach is at least 40% better than the existing greedy approaches.