Solving the MCP Problem Heuristically

Abstract

The multi-constrained path (MCP) selection problem occurs when the quality of services (QoS) are supported for point-to-point connections in the distributed multimedia applications deployed on the Internet. This NP-complete problem is concerned about how to determine a feasible path between two given end-points, so that a set of QoS path constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. Based on the branch-and-bound technique and tabu-searching strategy, an optimal algorithm and a tabu-search based heuristic algorithm are developed in this paper for solving the MCP problem with multiple constraints. The experimental results show that our tabu-search based heuristic algorithm not only outperforms the previous published method in [4], but also demonstrates that it is indeed a highly efficient method for solving the MCP problem in large-scale networks.