The authors present heuristics for multicast tree construction for communication that depends on: bounded end-to-end delay along the paths from source to each destination and minimum cost of the multicast tree, where edge cost and edge delay can be independent metrics. The problem of computing such a constrained multicast tree is NP-complete. It is shown that the heuristics demonstrate good average case behavior in terms of cost, as determined by simulations on a large number of graphs.>

The authors investigate multicast routing for high-bandwidth delay-sensitive applications in a point-to-point network as an optimization problem. They associate an edge cost and an edge delay with each edge in the network. The problem is to construct a tree spanning the destination nodes, such that it has the least cost, and so that the delay on the path from the source to each destination is bounded. Since the problem is computationally intractable, the authors present an efficient approximation algorithm. Experimental results through simulations show that the performance of the heuristic is near optimal.>