A heuristic ant algorithm for solving QoS multicast routing problem

Abstract

In this paper, we present an ant colony-based heuristic to solve QoS (quality of service) constrained multicast routing problems. Our algorithm considers multiple QoS metrics, such as bandwidth, delay, delay jitter and packet loss rate, to find the multicast tree that minimizes the total cost. We also explore the scalability of the ant algorithm. Our tests show that the algorithm can find optimal (or near-optimal) solutions quickly and that it has good scalability.