A new multicast routing algorithm with cost, delay and delay-variation constraints

Quality of service (QoS) provisioning generally assumes more than one QoS measure which implies that QoS routing can be categorized as an instance of routing subject to multiple constraints: delay-jitter, bandwidth, cost, etc. We study the problem of constructing multicast trees to meet the QoS requirements of real-time interactive applications where it is necessary to provide bounded delays and bounded delay variation among the source and all destinations while keeping overall cost of the multicast tree low. The main contribution of our work is a new strategy for constructing multiconstrained multicast trees. We first derive mathematically a new Delay-Variation Estimation Scheme and prove its efficiency. Thereafter, we propose a simple and competitive (in terms of system running time) heuristic algorithm, for delay and delay variation constrained routing problem based on the proposed delay-variation estimation scheme and using the Extended Prim-Dijkstra tradeoffs´ algorithm. Besides, our algorithm uses cost information only from neighboring nodes as it proceeds which makes it more practical from an implementation point of view. Our contribution also extends previous works in providing some properties and analyses of delay bounded paths satisfying delay variation constraints.