Application of modified Ant Colony Optimization (MACO) for multicast routing problem

Abstract

It is well known that multicast routing is combinatorial problem finds the optimal path between source destination pairs. Traditional approaches solve this problem by establishment of the spanning tree for the network which is mapped as an undirected weighted graph. This paper proposes a Modified Ant Colony Optimization (MACO) algorithm which is based on Ant Colony System (ACS) with some modification in the configuration of starting movement and in local updation technique to overcome the basic limitations of ACS such as poor initialization and slow convergence rate. It is shown that the proposed Modified Ant Colony Optimization (MACO) shows better convergence speed and consumes less time than the conventional ACS to achieve the desired solution.