ABSTRACT
The multicast technology has emerged as a dominant and critical technique for the e-commerce applications to best utilize effectively the network bandwidth. In this paper, we propose a solution to the problem of multicast transmission in the bidirectional fiber-optic and non-fiber optic ring networks and study the performance improvement of multicast transmission in existing LAN/MAN. Given a set of multicast groups, our objective is to design a bandwidth allocation strategy for packet transmission that has the minimum traffic load. We formulate the problem as an ILP (Integer Linear Program) and proposed a heuristic algorithm to obtain certain approximate solution. The numerical results indicate that the algorithm provides generally certain of near-optimal solution comparing to other optimal solutions solved by ILP.
