Ant Colony System for Real-time Multimedia Communications

Abstract

Multicast routing can significantly optimize network resource utilization and prevent network congestion when bandwidth-consuming applications are widely implemented in a network. Multicast routing for real-time multimedia applications must construct multicast trees that minimize resources usage and meet some quality-of-service requirements. This study presents a novel algorithm based on ant colony optimization, a new meta-heuristic for combinatorial optimization problems, for solving the bandwidth-delayconstrained multicast routing problem. The simulation results indicate that the proposed method is more effective and efficient than a representative method.