A hybrid ACO/PSO based algorithm for QoS multicast routing problem

AbstractMany Internet multicast applications such as videoconferencing, distance education, and online simulation require to send information from a source to some selected destinations. These applications have stringent Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements that include delay, loss rate, bandwidth, and delay jitter. This leads to the problem of routing multicast traffic satisfying QoS requirements. The above mentioned problem is known as the QoS constrained multicast routing problem and is NP Complete. In this paper, we present a swarming agent based intelligent algorithm using a hybrid Ant Colony Optimization (ACO)/Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) technique to optimize the multicast tree. The algorithm starts with generating a large amount of mobile agents in the search space. The ACO algorithm guides the agents’ movement by pheromones in the shared environment locally, and the global maximum of the attribute values are obtained through the random interaction between the agents using PSO algorithm. The performance of the proposed algorithm is evaluated through simulation. The simulation results reveal that our algorithm performs better than the existing algorithms

Macro-routing: a new hierarchical routing protocol

In a continually evolving Internet, tools such as quality of service routing must be used in order to accommodate user demands. QoS routing raises scalability issues within very large networks, which can he avoided by using hierarchical routing strategies. However, such strategies can lead to inaccurate path selection due to the aggregation process. To avoid such problems, we propose a hierarchical routing protocol, called macro-routing, which can distribute the route computation more efficiently throughout the network using mobile agents. It processes more detailed information than conventional hierarchical routing protocols, so is more likely to find the best path between source and destination. Also, by using mobile agents, more than one available path can be found. This provides a fast recovery mechanism, where no protocol restart is needed in a failure situation