A swarm intelligence based algorithm for QoS multicast routing problem

Abstract

The QoS multicast routing problem is to find a multicast routing tree with minimal cost that can satisfy constraints such as bandwidth, delay, delay jitter and loss rate. This problem is NP Complete. In this paper, we present a swarming agent based intelligence algorithm using a hybrid Ant Colony Optimization/Particle Swarm Optimization (ACO/PSO) algorithm to optimize the multicast tree. The algorithm starts with generating a large amount of mobile agents in the search space. The ACO algorithm guides agents' movement by pheromones in the shared environment locally and the global maximum of the attribute values are obtained through the random interaction between the agents using PSO algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation. The simulation results reveal that our algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms. © 2011 Springer-Verlag.