Performance evaluation of path searching heuristics for multicast QoS routing

Quality of service routing for multicast enables a group member to find and install a branch of the multicast tree that can meet its QoS constraints. The most promising protocols in this area use receiver-oriented path searching heuristics to find feasible routes. In this paper, we examine the performance of the path searching heuristics used by these protocols, to determine which techniques are the most effective. We find that several low-overhead path searching heuristics are effective, and that generic path searching can work as well as targeted, QoS-specific searching.