QoS multicast routing using a quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization algorithm

QoS multicast routing in networks is a very important research issue in networks and distributed systems. It is also a challenging and hard problem for high-performance networks of the next generation. Due to its NP-completeness, many heuristic methods have been employed to solve the problem. This paper proposes the modified quantum-behaved particle swarm optimization (QPSO) method for QoS multicast routing. In the proposed method, QoS multicast routing is converted into an integer programming problem with QoS constraints and is solved by the QPSO algorithm combined with loop deletion operation. The QPSO-based routing method, along with the routing algorithms based on particle swarm optimization (PSO) and genetic algorithm (GA), is tested on randomly generated network topologies for the purpose of performance evaluation. The simulation results show the efficiency of the proposed method on QoS the routing problem and its superiority to the methods based on PSO and GA. (C) 2010 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.