Proactive Rearrangement in Delay Constrained Multicast with Dynamic Membership Support

We propose an efficient heuristic algorithm to rearrange multicast trees proactively in delay constrained dynamic membership multicast networks. The objective is to construct low cost multicast tree with controlled number of disrupted members within a very short rearrangement time when a member joins and leaves the tree. In addition, a heuristic algorithm to obtain near-optimal solution to the problem is introduced as the benchmark. A new performance index to gauge the efficiency of the proposed heuristics more accurately is also introduced. Better performance is obtained when compared with existing methods using simulations.