Abstract
The most critical task for group communication routing lies in the establishment of a communication tree over the network. This thesis proposes a Programmable Distributed Multicast Routing Protocol (PDMRP) to establish a multicast tree for group communications. The proposed scheme is well-suited for different applications, such as Video-on-Demand and video conference, due to it is programmable. Thus, by employing the PDMRP with specific parameters, we can have different multicast trees for different applications. Simulation results indicate that the performance of the PDMRP are close to that of the well-known KMB routhing algorithm in terms of call blocking rate and the number of successfully established trees. Nevertheless, the height of the tree constructed by the PDMRP is lower than that obtained by the KMB scheme.