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Efficient solutions to multicast routing in communication networks

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Abstract

An important problem in both wireless and wired communication networks is to be able to efficiently multicst information to a group of network sites. Multicasting reduces the transmission overhead of both wireless and wired networks and the time it takes for all the nodes in the subset to receive the information. Since transmission bandwidth is a scarce commodity especially in wireless networks, efficient and near minimum-cost multicast algorithms are particularly useful in the wireless context. In this paper, we discuss methods of establishing efficient and near minimum-cost multicast routing in communication networks. In particular, we discuss an efficient implementation of a widely used multicast routing method which can construct a multicast tree with a cost no greater than twice the cost of an optimal tree. We also present two efficient multicast tree constructions for a general version of the multicast routing problem in which a network consists of different classes of nodes, where each class can have one or more nodes of the same characteristic which is different from the characteristics of nodes from other classes. Because of their efficient running times, these multicast routing methods are particularly useful in the mobile communication environments where topology changes will imply recomputation of the multicast trees. Furthermore, the proposed efficient and near minimum-cost multicast routing methods are particularly suited to the wireless communication environments, where transmission bandwidth is more scarce than wired communication environments.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Computer Science, University of Nevada at Las Vegas, 89154, Las Vegas, Nevada, USA

    Kia Makki

  2. The Center For Advanced Computer Studies, The University of Southwestern Lousiana, 70504, Lafayette, LA, USA

    Niki Pissinou

  3. Department of Computer Science, George Mason University, 22030, Fairfax, Virginia, USA

    Ophir Frieder

Authors
  1. Kia Makki
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  2. Niki Pissinou
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  3. Ophir Frieder
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Additional information

Partially supported by NSF/LaSER under grant number EHR-9108765, by LEQSF grant number 94-RD-A-39, by NASA under grant number NAG 5-2842.

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Makki, K., Pissinou, N. & Frieder, O. Efficient solutions to multicast routing in communication networks. Mobile Netw Appl 1, 221–232 (1996). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF01193338

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