Abstract:

Multicast routing and Quality of Service (QoS) are two important research issues in current and next generation of the Internet. As a joint research problem of the two issues, QoS multicast routing is a multi-objective and optimization problem. Furthermore it is NP-Complete and its solution is urgently needed in practice. The problem models of QoS multicast algorithms and their mathematical descriptions were integrated. A classification of the QoS multicast algorithms and a survey on the current development results in the research areas were given. Several typical QoS multicast routing algorithms were analyzed,then the problems of these algorithms were pointed out, and finally possible research directions in the future were prospected.

Key words: multicast routing; quality of service (QoS); classification;optimization