Because of  the  high-speed  and  QOS  guarantees,  ATM  networks  are  getting  popular  in
multimedia applications.  There  are  multimedia  applications  that  require  messages  to  be
delivered in an order that preserves cause and effect relations in multicasts (called causal
order multicast).  Causal order multicast algorithms introduce an overhead because they
append control  information  to messages  to enforce  the  causal  order.  In  this  paper,  we
present a  framework  for  evaluating  causal  multicast  algorithms.  We  present  a  causal
multicast algorithm called  the partition method that supports multicasting and  has  a  low
overhead. We compare and analyze  its cost with the cost of two existing  algorithms on
ATM networks,  called  the  causal  order  multicast  and  delta  causal  order  multicast
methods. This  analysis  is  carried  out  for  four  different  sample  network  topologies  to
represent different configurations.