Abstract:

 Many applications in network like multimedia transmission have stringent demands for quality of service (QoS), such as bandwidth, delay, and packet loss rate. Finding the multicast tree that satisfies these requirements is an NP-complete problem. Among the existing algorithms for multiple QoS constrained multicast are local search algorithms or centralized algorithms, which cannot guarantee the finding of global solutions in a real network. In this paper, an ant colony algorithm based on cross-entropy was proposed for multiple QoS constrained multicast routing. Simulation results in the NS-2 environment indicated that this algorithm could quickly find the close-to-the-best solution.

Key words: cross-entropy; ant colony system; multicast routing; quality of service (QoS)