Abstract
In this paper, the dynamic multicast routing problem is studied. The multicast routing problem has been shown to be NP-complete. Many heuristics have been proposed to find the multicast trees for multicast connections. In computer networks, application services may allow nodes to join or leave the multicast connection dynamically. The multicast routing problem in which nodes are allowed to join or leave the multicast connection is called the dynamic multicast routing problem. A new dynamic multicast routing algorithm called Virtual Trunk Dynamic Multicast (VTDM) routing algorithm is proposed for this problem. A Virtual Trunk (VT) is a tree of the underlying graph. It is used as a template for constructing multicast trees. The VTDM routing algorithm constructs multicast trees based on the virtual trunk. Simulations are performed to study the performance of the VTDM routing algorithm. Simulation results show that the performance of the VTDM algorithm is close to that of the KMB algorithm [14] (a near optimal heuristic for the static multicast routing problem).