A hybrid metaheuristic for routing on multicast networks

Abstract

Multicast routing systems have the objective of simultaneously transferring data to multiple destination nodes while using a single “push” operation. This leads to cost savings associated with reduced bandwidth utilization, which results from a decrease in data duplication across network links. An important problem on multicast networks, known as the delay constrained multicast routing problem (DCMRP), asks for the determination of an optimal route for packet transfers between members of a multicast group. Several heuristics have been proposed in the last few years to solve the DCMRP, which is of great interest for telecommunication engineers. In this paper we propose a novel, hybrid metaheuristic approach for the DCMRP, where a greedy randomized adaptive search procedure is used along with variable neighborhood search algorithm to find near optimal solutions. Computational experiments show that the proposed technique provides superior solution quality, while it is also efficient in terms of the use of computational resources.