Multi-Constrained Dynamic QoS Multicast Routing Design Using Ant Colony System

In this paper, an Ant Colony System (AC) based heuristic algorithm is presented to find the multi-constrained dynamic Quality of Service (QoS) multicast routing. We also explore the scalability of the AC algorithm and multicast tree by using “Pull” mode instead of “Push” mode, and the improvement on the time complexity of AC algorithm by using a new data structure, i.e., a pointer array instead of the previous “matrix” structure. Our extensive tests show that the presented algorithm can find the global optimum or suboptimum, and has a good scalability with dynamic adaptation to the change of multicast group, and gives better performance in terms of the total cost than other two algorithms.