A distributed primal-dual heuristic for Steiner problems in networks

Multicast routing problems are often modeled as Steiner Problems in undirected or directed graphs, the later case being particularly suitable to cases where most of the traffic has a single source. Sequential Steiner heuristics are not convenient in that context, since one cannot assume that a central node has complete information about the topology and the state of a large wide area network. This paper introduces a distributed version of a primal-dual heuristic (known as Dual Ascent), known for its remarkable good practical results, lower and upper bounds, in both undirected and directed Steiner problems. Experimental results and complexity analysis are also presented, showing the efficiency of the proposed algorithm when compared with the best distributed algorithms in the literature.