Report Number: CSL-TR-94-619
Institution: Stanford University, Computer Systems Laboratory
Title: Evaluation of Multicast Routing Algorithms for Multimedia Streams
Author: Noronha, Ciro A., Jr.
Author: Tobagi, Fouad A.
Date: April 1994
Abstract: Multimedia applications place new requirements on networks as compared to traditional data applications: (i) they require relatively high bandwidths on a continuous basis for long periods of time; (ii) involve multipoint communications and thus are expected to make heavy use of multicasting; and (iii) tend to be interactive and thus require low latency. These requirements must be taken into account when routing multimedia traffic in a network. This report presents a performance evaluation of routing algorithms in the multimedia environment, where the requirements of multipoint communications, bandwidth and latency must be satisfied. We present an exact solution to the optimum multicast routing problem, based on integer programming, and use this solution as a benchmark to evaluate existing heuristic algorithms, considering both performance and cost of implementation (as measured by the average run time), under realistic network and traffic scenarios.
http://i.stanford.edu/pub/cstr/reports/csl/tr/94/619/CSL-TR-94-619.pdf