QoS Routing in Multicast Networks Based on Imperialism Competition Algorithm

Abstract

At the age of multimedia communications and high speed networks, multicast is one of the mechanisms which we can employ to enjoy the power of internet. On the other hand, increase in real-time multimedia applications, has emerged the need for Quality of Service (QoS) in multicast routing. Two important parameters in QoS-supported multicast communications are bandwidth and end- to-end delay. The main goal of multicast routing is finding a least-cost tree which is called Steiner Tree. This problem belongs to NP-Complete problems, so it is necessary to use heuristic-based or artificial intelligence – based algorithms to solve it. Imperialism Competition Algorithm (ICA) is a method in evolutionary mathematics which finds the optimum solution for different optimization problems. In this paper, we use ICA to solve QoS multicast routing problem and create the minimum Steiner tree while considering QoS parameters such as end-to-end delay and bandwidth.