Decentralized reconfiguration of multicast trees on faulty networks

In this paper, we propose a distributed reconfiguring multicast tree protocol. It is assumed that a multicast tree, which has the minimal total tree cost, exists originally, but due to some edges or processors failures, the tree is broken into several fragments. Our protocol reconstructs the multicast tree, instead of starting from scratch, keeping the original tree structure by distributed finding the nearest fragment to merge together. The protocol is distributed, it does not require knowledge of the complete network topology, and each node proceeds in three phases: changing colors, finding the shortest paths, and merging the fragments. The protocol terminates when the number of fragments becomes one and the message complexity is O(kd(2)(N-N-T)+kdN(T)), where k is the number of fragments, d is the average degree of nodes, N is the number of nodes in the network, and N-T is the number of tree nodes.