The Tree-Based Ant Colony Algorithm for Multi-Constraints Multicast Routing

Based on the principle of ant colony algorithm this paper proposes a new ant colony algorithm based on trees, and applies it to the solution of multi-constraints QoS network multicast routing. An ant moves constantly on the network to find a multicast tree including source nodes and destination nodes. This action is operated repetitively and pheromones are updated regularly, and an optimal multicast tree satisfying different QoS constraints can finally be found. Simulation results indicate that in solving multicast routing problems the convergence speed of the tree-based ant colony algorithm is much higher than that of conventional ant colony algorithm. And the performance of the best solution found by the new algorithm is not worse.