Minimizing cost and delay in shared multicast trees

Existing tree construction mechanisms are classified into source-based trees and center-based trees. The source-based trees produce a source-rooted tree with a low delay. However, for the applications with multiple senders, the management overheads for muting tables and resource reservations are too high. The center-based trees are easy to implement and manage, but a priori configuration of candidate center nodes is required, and the optimization nature such as tree cost and delay is not considered. In this paper, we propose a new multicast tree building algorithm. The proposed algorithm basically builds a non-center based shared tree. In particular, any center node is not pre-configured. In the proposed algorithm, a multicast node among current tree nodes is suitably assigned to each incoming user. Such a node is selected in a fashion that tree cost and the maximum end-to-end delay on the tree are jointly minimized. The existing and proposed algorithms are compared by experiments. In the simulation results, it is shown that the proposed algorithm approximately provides the cost saving of 30% and the delay saving of 10%, compared to the existing approaches. In conclusion, we see that the cost and delay aspects for multicast trees can be improved at the cost of additional computations.