| Summary: | The critical requirements for real-time multicast routing is to generate a multicast tree that has (i) minimal overall network cost and (ii) acceptable end-to-end network delay in every paths. These requirements are often conflicting in nature and the problem of minimising overall network cost in multicast routing is equivalent to the Steiner Tree problem which is known to be NP-complete. In this paper, a real-time multicast routing algorithm using heuristics is proposed. This algorithm has two main characteristics : (i) it can achieve a desired balance between optimising the network cost and optimising the network delay while ensuring that individual path delay is within a given delay constraint, (ii) it can handle dynamic multicast group membership without rebuilding the entire multicast tree. In the paper, the performance of this algorithm is compared against other multicast algorithms using simulation and is shown to be comparable with the best of them.
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