Combination of genetic algorithm and ant colony optimization for qos multicast routing

QoS-aware multicast routing service is becoming an important requirement of computer networks supporting group-based applications, such as multimedia conferencing, video conferencing, video telephony and distance learning. These real-time multimedia applications require the transmission of messages from a sender to multiple receivers subject to QoS constraints. This requires the underlying multicast routing protocol to find a QoS constrained minimum cost multicast spanning tree. However, the problem of finding the minimum cost multicast tree is known to be an NP -complete problem. In this paper, we present a new method GAACO to solve this minimum cost multicast routing problem. In this method, genetic algorithm (GA) and ant colony optimization (ACO) are combined to improve the computing performance. The simulation results show that the proposed GAACO algorithm has superior performance when compared to other existing algorithms. © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014.