An ant colony system algorithm for the multicast routing problem

With the rapid development in network services, multicast has recently became a hot spot in communication technology. The multicast routing is the key to multicast implementation. A modified ant colony system is presented in this paper to do the single-origin-multi-destination routing without constraints. This algorithm first transforms the connective network into the corresponding distance complete graph, and then develops a Prim's-algorithm-like route construction process with an inclination factor towards the multicast vertexes. Simulations on a set of benchmark instances prove that the proposed algorithm is a worthy attempt for the multicast routing problem.