A Distributed Protocol for Constructing Multicast Trees

An important problem in large-scale wide-area networks is to provide communication facilities for nodes of a distributed application that are attached to various machines in the network. Providing connectivity among a set of application nodes in a network can be modeled as the Steiner tree problem which is an NP-complete problem. Although several heuristics have been proposed in the literature, most of these are serial and centralized. In this paper, we propose a distributed protocol for Steiner tree construction. The protocol uses the shortest path information available from the routing tables to construct a tree, and requires only a subset of nodes to participate in the protocol. We have performed simulation studies to compare our protocol with existing distributed heuristics. The results show that our protocol is message eecient and the quality of the trees found is comparable to those found by several existing heuristics.