Centralized multi-point routing in wide area networks

Proposed novel applications, such as pay TV on demand, require point to multi-point routing for efficient bandwidth utilization. Finding the optimal point to multi-point route in a network is equivalent to finding the minimum cost spanning tree that spans a subset of the network nodes. This is the well known Steiner tree problem, which is NP complete. Efficient heuristics are, however, available to solve the Steiner tree problem. But, these heuristics for static networks are not suitable for practical telecommunication networks where the routing tree topology changes continuously with time due to addition and/or deletion of customer nodes, changes in link weights, etc. The paper presents heuristics which address point to multi-point routing in centralized networks, the networks where complete topological information is available at every node