Adaptive multicast routing in ATM networks

In this paper, we study the multicast routing problem in ATM networks. The multicast routing problem, also known as the Steiner tree problem, has been well studied in the literature. However, less attention has been made for the definition of link costs and evaluating the performance of multicast routing algorithm from the network revenue point of view. Therefore, in this paper, we first proposed two approaches, namely, the Markov Decision Process-based (MDP) and Maximum Free residual Capacity-based (MFC) approaches, for defining link costs. We then developed three heuristic algorithms for finding near optimal multicast trees. Our simulation results indicate algorithms that estimating link costs based on the MDP approach yield better performance than those that based on the MFC approach. Among the three multicast routing algorithms that use MDP approach for estimating link costs, the algorithm that treats a multicast call as a collection of multiple point-to-point calls yields the worst performance while the algorithm that based on the genetic algorithm yields the best performance.