An efficient evolutionary algorithm for multicast routing with multiple QoS constraints

The multi-constrained least-cost multicast routing is a challenging problem in multimedia networks. Computing such a constrained Steiner tree is an NP-complete problem. We propose a novel solution to this problem based on genetic algorithms (GA). The proposed solution consists of several new heuristic algorithms for mutation, crossover, and creation of random individuals. The predecessors encoding scheme is used for genotype representation. We evaluate the performance and efficiency of the proposed GA-based algorithm in comparison with other existing heuristic and GA-based algorithms using simulation results. The most efficient combination of various proposed alternative algorithms is selected as our final solution based on the simulation results. This proposed GA-based algorithm has overcome the existing algorithms considering average tree cost and running time.