Multicast tree construction with QoS guaranties

Abstract

Multimedia applications, such as videoconferences, require an efficient management of the Quality of Service (QoS) and consist of a great number of participants which requires the use of multicast routing protocol. Unlike unicast protocol, multicast protocol handles a great number of users while minimizing both network overhead and bandwidth consumption. However, combining multicast routing and QoS guarantee is a hard challenging task, known as the delay and delay variation multicast problem. This problem is considered as an NP-complete problem, and is resolved only by heuristic solutions. In this paper, we propose a scalable multicast algorithm that tackle the delay and delay variation by exploiting the Hierarchic Tree construction concepts. In fact, the proposal algorithm guarantees QoS by: (i) reducing the network charge; (ii) decreasing the multicast delay variation. We compare the performance of our algorithm against the DDVCA (Delay and Delay Variation Constraint Algorithm) scheme and demonstrate lower multicast delay variation and efficient bandwidth utilization while maintaining lower time complexity. © IFIP International Federation for Information Processing 2005.