An efficient routing to minimize the cost for dynamic multicasting

Multicast has become increasingly important as networks are used to carry continuous media traffic such as voice and video to the end user. In dynamic multicasting, destination nodes are joining and leaving the group during the communication period. A re-routing may produce an optimal route, but it is impractical for various reasons. A better routing could be possible, without re-routing, if the users behavior can be predicted. With the increasing popularity of advance resource reservation, it is possible to estimate the users´ duration of staying time, and thus a better routing that can efficiently minimize the total cost of whole session is feasible. We propose a centralized heuristic routing algorithm, which optimizes the total cost of the Steiner tree over the whole session period. The efficiency of our proposed algorithm over Greedy and Naive algorithms is shown by simulation results