A Genetic Algorithms Based Approach for Group Multicast Routing

Abstract

Whereas multicast transmission in one-to-many communications allows the operator to drastically save network resources, it also makes the routing of the traffic flows more complex then in unicast transmissions. A huge amount of possible trees have to be considered and analyzed to find the appropriate routing paths. To address this problem, we propose the use of the genetic algorithms (GA), which considerably reduce the number of solutions to be evaluated. A heuristic procedure is first used to discern a set of possible trees for each multicast session in isolation. Then, the GA are applied to find the appropriate combination of the trees to comply with the bandwidth needs of the group of multicast sessions simultaneously. The goodness of each solution is assessed by means of an expression that weights both network bandwidth allocation and one-way delay. The resulting cost function is guided by few parameters that can be easily tuned during traffic engineering operations; an appropriate setting of these parameters allows the operator to configure the desired balance between network resource utilization and provided quality of service. Simulations have been performed to compare the proposed algorithm with alternative solutions in terms of bandwidth utilization and transmission delay.