Patent ID: 7246172

Claim:
A method for performing path management for a plurality of select data transmission sessions in a multicast network, the network having a plurality of nodes interconnected by a plurality of links, comprising: (a) constructing a weighted graph which represents topology of the network; (b) assigning a cost to each link in the network; (c) determining a path for a given data transmission session based on link cost and bandwidth utilization; (d) adjusting link cost associated with each link along the path, such that the adjusted link cost accounts for load on the respective link and the link cost for each link along the oath is increased by an incremental cost whose accumulation will not exceed a bound defined as Ĉ=1/|E|, where the bound is a function of at least the network topology and |E| is a number of edges in the weighted graph; and (e) repeating steps (c) and (d) for the remaining data transmission sessions, thereby assigning a set of flow paths for each of the plurality of selected data transmission sessions.