Emerging multimedia technologies introduce the prevalent multicast transmission, and the multicast tree is determined using the time-invariant network parameters. This paper addresses the time-varying multicast tree problem and presents path selection heuristics for multicast routing to determine an alternative path for real-time applications. A network is partitioned into the optimal region, the disjoint region, and the edge cutset if a branch of the multicast tree meets the un-guaranteed QoS condition. The path selection heuristics operate during the multicast session phase to efficiently select an alternative routing path containing an edge in the edge cutset to connect the multicast tree again. The source-based heuristics PS-SPT finds the path for minimal source-to-destination delay and the sharing-based heuristics PS-DDMC for minimal total cost. These path selection heuristics can efficiently provide solutions to keep the multicast transmission reliable. Simulation results also show that the proposed heuristics can provide effective good solutions for real-time multicast transmission. PS-SPT can select a path with optimal source-to-destination delay and PS-DDMC can select a path with optimal total cost.

Session length and group size are two most significant factors in achieving efficient scheduling for unicast and multicast traffic in single-hop wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) local area networks (LANs). This paper presents a hybrid protocol to schedule both unicast and multicast traffic in broadcast WDM networks. The protocol makes an important assumption that unicast traffic is the major portion of the overall traffic and is usually scheduled with a pre-allocation-based protocol. On the other hand, multicast traffic is a smaller portion of the overall traffic with multicast sessions and multicast groups, and is scheduled with a reservation-based protocol. The concept of multicast threshold, a function of random variables including the multicast session length and the multicast group size, is also proposed to partition the multicast traffic into two types. If the transmission threshold of a multicast request is larger than the multicast threshold, the request is handled with a reservation-based protocol. Otherwise, the multicast request is handled similar to unicast traffic; that is, each packet in the multicast session is replicated and sent to the unicast queues of destinations. The results show that the hybrid protocol can achieve better channel utilization efficiency and packet delay for unicast traffic under the multicast scenarios with moderate session length and group size. However, separate scheduling or broadcasting will be more suitable for a multicast scenario with very large session length and group size, which is not common on most realistic networks.