“…In a wired network, the multicast packets are forwarded along the tree edges, and so the multicast routing problem can be defined as a Steiner tree problem where the multicast group members are the terminals (leaf nodes) in the Steiner tree (Wu, Xu, Chen, & Wang, 2004). The problem of finding a Steiner tree is known to be NP-complete (Karp, 1972), even if links have unit cost (Aggarwal, Dubey, & Mehta, 2006). It should be noted that in some multicast routing protocols (Chiang, Liu, & Huang, 2007;Rodolakis et al, 2008) the minimum spanning tree problem, which is a well known approach for broadcasting, is also used to model the multicast routing problem.…”