Ant Colony Optimization for Multi-Objective Multicast Routing

In the distributed networks, many applications send information from a source node to multiple destination nodes. To support these applications requirements, the paper presents a multi-objective algorithm based on ant colonies to construct a multicast tree for data transmission in a computer network. The proposed algorithm simultaneously optimizes total weight (cost, delay and hop) of the multicast tree. Experimental results prove the proposed algorithm outperforms a recently published Multi-objective Multicast Algorithm specially designed for solving the multicast routing problem. Also, it is able to find a better solution with fast convergence speed and high reliability.