Comparison of Multicast Algorithm Evaluation Results in Low and High Multicast Saturation Environments

The multicast quality of service-enabled routing is a computationally challenging task. Despite ongoing research efforts, the associated mathematical problems are still considered to be NP-hard. In certain applications, computational complexity of finding the optimal connection between a set of network devices may be a particularly difficult challenge. For example, connecting a small group of participants of a teleconference is not much more complex than setting up a set of mutual point-to-point connections. On the other hand, satisfying the demand for such services as IPTV, with their receivers constituting the majority of the network, requires applying appropriate optimization methods in order to ensure real system execution. In this paper, algorithms solving this class of problems are considered. The notion of multicast saturation is introduced to measure the amount of multicast participants relative to the entire network, and the efficiency of the analyzed algorithms is evaluated for different saturation degrees. Keywords—quality-of-service, multicast, routing, multicast saturation.