Rouskas and Baldine: Multicast Routing with End-to-end Delay and Delay Variation Constraints

| We study the problem of constructing multi-cast trees to meet the quality of service requirements of real-time interactive applications operating in high-speed packet-switched environments. In particular, we assume that multicast communication depends on (a) bounded delay along the paths from the source to each destination, and (b) bounded variation among the delays along these paths. We rst establish that the problem of determining such a constrained tree is NP-complete. We then present a heuris-tic that demonstrates good average case behavior in terms of the maximum inter-destination delay variation. The heuris-tic achieves its best performance under conditions typical of multicast scenarios in high-speed networks. We also show that it is possible to dynamically reorganize the initial tree in response to changes in the destination set, in a way that is minimally disruptive to the multicast session.