An Artificial Bee Colony Optimization algorithm for multicast routing

The most important problem in multicast routing is Steiner tree problem, which has been proved to be NP-complete. This article proposed an algorithm based on Artificial Bee Colony Optimization (ABC). In this algorithm, we optimize the Steiner tree directly. It is not the same as traditional methods that find paths and integrate them to generate a Steiner tree. This algorithm use the characteristic of the ABC, such as fast convergence, get optimum solution quickly. We did a lot experiments in different topology scale, and compared performance of multicast tree, convergence time and multicast tree cost with other algorithms, this algorithm has good improvement in optimization ability and convergence speed.