The real-time multicast channel needs a network resource reservation scheme applied to its route in order to guarantee satisfactory performance. Resource sharing is a mechanism that exploits the known behavior of related channels in order to reduce the aggregate network resources allocated to these channels. It is applied to overlapped paths of related channels. If the sharing effect is reflected upon the route cost negotiation in multicast routing algorithm before multicast channel establishment, more amount of reserved network resources can be reduced by the resource sharing mechanism.
We propose a dynamic sharing factor to be used in the cost function of multicast channel routing algorithm. The dynamic sharing factor forces the multicast channel to route along the common sub-path for increased resource sharing. Our simulation results indicate that using the dynamic sharing factor in cost function increases resource utilization, but it has the effect of elongating the end-to-end delay by making the multicast channel detour through the common sub-paths.
