A heuristic algorithm for delay delay-variation bounded least cost multicast routing

Many multimedia communication applications require a source to transmit messages to multiple destinations subject to delay and delay-variation constraints. To support delay constrained multicast communications, computer networks have to guarantee an upper bound end-to-end delay from the source node to each of the destination nodes. On the other hand, if the same message fails to arrive at each destination node at the same time, there will probably arise inconsistency and unfairness problem among users. The problem to find a minimum cost multicast tree with delay and delay variation constraints has been proven to be NP-Complete. In this paper, we present a more efficient heuristic algorithm, namely, Economic Delay and Delay Variation Bounded Multicast Algorithm (EDVBMA), based on a novel heuristic function, to construct a least cost delay and delay variation bounded multicast tree. A noteworthy feature of this algorithm is that it has very high probability of finding the optimal solution in polynomial time with low computational complexity.