A resource‐tuned QoS multicast routing protocol

Summary This paper presents a novel framework for quality‐of‐service (QoS) multicast routing with resource allocation that represents QoS parameters, jitter delay, and reliability, as functions of adjustable network resources, bandwidth, and buffer, rather than static metrics. The particular functional form of QoS parameters depends on rate‐based service disciplines used in the routers. This allows intelligent tuning of QoS parameters as functions of allocated resources during the multicast tree search process, rather than decoupling the tree search from resource allocation. The proposed framework minimizes the network resource utilization while keeping jitter delay, reliability, and bandwidth bounded. This definition makes the proposed QoS multicast routing with resource allocation problem more general than the classical minimum Steiner tree problem. As an application of our general framework, we formulate the QoS multicast routing with resource allocation problem for a network consisting of generalized processor sharing nodes as a mixed‐integer quadratic program and find the optimal multicast tree with allocated resources to satisfy the QoS constraints. We then present a polynomial‐time greedy heuristic for the QoS multicast routing with resource allocation problem and compare its performance with the optimal solution of the mixed‐integer quadratic program. The simulation results reveal that the proposed heuristic finds near‐optimal QoS multicast trees along with important insights into the interdependency of QoS parameters and resources.