Multicast routing with bandwidth and delay constraints based on genetic algorithms

Many multimedia communication applications require a source to send multimedia information to multiple destinations through a communication network. To support these applications, it is necessary to determine a multicast tree of minimal cost to connect the source node to the destination nodes subject to delay constraints on multimedia communication. This problem is known as multimedia multicast routing and has been proved to be NP-complete. The paper proposes a genetic algorithm for solving multimedia multicast routing, which find the low-cost multicasting tree with bandwidth and delay constraints. In the proposed algorithm, the k shortest paths from the source node to the destination nodes are used for genotype representation. The simulation results show that the proposed algorithm is able to find a better solution, fast convergence speed and high reliability. It can meet the real-time requirement in multimedia communication networks. The scalability and the performance of the algorithm with increasing number of network nodes are also quite encouraged.