Evaluation of pheromone update in Min-Max Ant System algorithm to optimizing QoS for multimedia services in NGNs

Abstract

Next Generation Networks (NGN) is towards providing seamless Quality of Service (QoS) for converged mobile and fix multimedia services anywhere-anytime to users through different access network technologies. Factors affecting the QoS in NGN are speech encoders, delay, jitter, packet loss and echo. The negotiation and dynamic adaptation of QoS is currently considered to be one of the key features of the NGN concept. Optimal QoS for multimedia services in the NGNs for multiflow resource constrained utility maximization is complex problem. In this paper, we propose a novel Min-Max Ant System (MMAS) algorithm with a pheromone updating scheme to solve it. We compared effective of MMAS to SMMAS (Smoothed MMAS), MLAS (Multi-level Ant System) and 3-LAS (Three-level Ant System). The computational results showed that our approach is currently among the best performing algorithms for this problem.