'Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE)'
Doi
Abstract
The high capacity provided by packet-switched
networks is supporting the proliferation of bandwidth intensive multimedia applications which require multicasting capability. As
a consequence on today’s networks, unicast and multicast traffic compete for shared resources where a router must maintain both
unicast and multicast forwarding states. Pursuing a forwarding state reduction, in this paper we introduce the novel concept
of AnyTraffic data group which consists of a group of nodes receiving both unicast and multicast traffic over the same single
minimum-cost network entity. A novel heuristic algorithm is specifically defined to accommodate such data group and has been compared with the standard shortest path (SP) algorithm - the optimal case for unicast routing - and a classical Steiner
tree (ST) heuristic algorithm - the optimal case for multicast routing. Exhaustive experiments have been performed to validate
the proposed algorithm.Postprint (published version