Steiner tree compilation of multicast under differentiated services constraints

This paper deals with the creation of multicast trees in a differentiated services (DiffServ) domain. Initially, we model the integration problems of multicast & DiffServ and give a general description of our framework for multicast provisioning in DiffServ domains. Within this framework, we introduce a novel heuristic algorithm which calculates the multicast trees efficiently. The multicast tree´s format and the bandwidth constraints per service class are modeled. The heuristic is based on the Dijkstra´s shortest path algorithm and aims to produce the cheapest possible trees (Steiner tree problem) that conform to the defined model. The produced trees can be considered as DiffServ-customized Steiner trees. Furthermore, we evaluate the algorithm with theoretical and experimental analysis and finally, we present our conclusions.