The advancement in optical fiber and switching technologies has resulted in a new generation of high-speed networks that can achieve speeds of up to a few gigabits per second. Also, the progress in audio, video and data storage technologies has given rise to new distributed real-time applications. These applications may involve multimedia, which require low end-to-end delay. The applications’ requirements, such as the end-to-end delay, delay jitter, and loss rate, are expressed as QoS parameters, which must be guaranteed. In addition, many of these new applications involve multiple users, and hence the importance of multicast communication. Multimedia applications are becoming increasingly important, as networks are now capable of carrying continuous media traffic, such as voice and video, to the end user. When there is a lot of information to transmit to a subset of hosts, then multicast is the best possible way to facilitate it. This article addresses different multicast routing algorithms and protocols. We have also discussed about the QoS multicast routing and conclude this article with mobile multicasting.
