A group multicast routing algorithm by using multiple minimum Steiner trees

Multicast is a communication abstract in which a process sends a message to a group of processes. Group multicast is a kind of multicast where only members of the group can multicast to the group and every member of the group is allowed to multicast to the group. The routing of group multicast is to find a set of routing trees, one for each group member, for multicasting messages to the group. The traditional method is to generate each of this set of trees independently from the others and each of the trees is made optimal in terms of network cost. However, the overall network cost of the set of optimal trees may not be optimal. This paper proposes an algorithm for generating a set of routing trees, which aims at optimizing the overall cost of the set of routing trees of the group. Simulations have been done to compare our algorithm with the traditional method in various network situations. © 1997 Elsevier Science B.V.