Research of network coding resources optimization based on ant colony optimization

Although network coding can make network achieve the maximum multicast rate, it always brings additional overheads. It is necessary to minimize unnecessary overhead while achieving the desired throughput in a multicast scenario. Current solutions are mostly based on genetic algorithms that aim to reach the least number of coding links. The drawback of the methodology of genetic algorithms is that the solution space is very large and this in turn leads to inefficiency on the convergence speed. Furthermore, most genetic algorithms fail to consider the link cost which it is very important in some applications. This paper is based on ant colony algorithms to minimize link cost, and then consider minimizing the number of coding nodes.