Localized multicast routing

Multicast is a fundamental issue in distributed computing and networking, especially for applications such as audio and video transmission. The minimal cost route selection problem for multicasting is an NP-complete problem even for regular network topologies such as meshes and hypercubes. We therefore present a simple heuristic algorithm for multicast route selection in arbitrarily-connected point-to-point communication networks. Several other heuristics have been presented for finding the minimal multicast route, but most of them are global in the sense that the source uses global cost information to construct a multicast tree. Our algorithm does not require the use of global cost information; it uses cost information only from neighboring nodes as it proceeds which makes it more practical from an implementation paint of view. The performance of the algorithm is analyzed through empirical comparisons and is shown to perform as well against algorithms which use global information