Multicast is a communication abstract in which a source sends messages to a group of destinations. Group multicast refers to a kind of multicast where only members of a group can multicast to the group and every member is able to multicast to the group. Group multicast is an important tool to implement group coordinations, groupware and conferencing systems. An example of such an application is a video conferencing system where each message multicast by a presenter must be received by all the participants and every participant can be a presenter. In such real-time multimedia applications, the ability to transmit information with bounded end-to-end delay while minimizing network cost by sharing network bandwidth is an important goal. The objective of group multicast is to find a set of routing trees that is able to meet these quality of service requirements. In the research project, we proposed two routing heuristics, the Constrained Group TM (CGTM) algorithm and the Constrained Group KMB (CGKMB) algorithm for finding constrained group multicast trees. The performance of the two algorithms were then compared against one another and the CGTM algorithm was found to have better cost performance than the CGKMB algorithm. The tradeoff was that the CGTM algorithm had higher average delays as compared to the CGKMB algorithm.

Master of Science (Communication and Network Systems)