A micro-artificial bee colony based multicast routing in vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular ad hoc networks (VANETs) have drawn great attention in wireless communications. Prompt and reliable vehicular communication is a must to provide a good service. Routing is the key problem in information transmission of VANETs. This paper studies quality of service (QoS) constrained multicast routing problem. This problem has been proved to be NP-complete problem, and swarm intelligence algorithms are more suitable than classical algorithms. A micro artificial bee colony (MABC) algorithm is proposed to deal with the problem. The QoS constraints include maximize network lifetime and minimizing delay cost. Multicast routing is abstracted to a continuous optimization problem. Then, it is linked with MABC. Numerical simulation is implemented on a traffic scenario with three instances. Results show that the MABC algorithm successfully attains the optimal routes. Moreover, the routing framework can be applied in real time given the network structure does not change too frequently.