A steady-state NSGA-II based multi-objective multicast routing algorithm for optical networks

Abstract

Multicast routing for wavelength division multiplexing optical network is a challenging problem in optical networks. The Multicast Routing and Wavelength Assignment (MRWA) problem has been proved to be a NP complete problem. In this paper, the MRWA problem in Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM) has been modeled as a Multi-Objective Multicast Routing and Wavelength Assignment (MOMRWA) optimization problem with three optimization objectives, including minimizing the resource cost, minimizing the end-to-end delay and minimizing the used channels. Some Quality of Service metrics have also been considered in MOMRWA. To tackle the MOMRWA problem, a multi-objective genetic algorithm, namely MRWA_SSNSGA-II, has been proposed, which is based on the Steady-State Non-Dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm II combined with the Efficient Non-Domination Level Update (ENLU) strategy. The purpose of the ENLU strategy is to reduce the computing time of maintaining the Non-Domination Level structure. In order to avoid the loop generated by the gene recombination, a light tree recovery mechanism based on the Minimum Path Cost Heuristic has been proposed. We evaluate our proposed MRWA_SSNSGA-II on a large number of test instances with different sizes. Experimental results demonstrate that MRWA_SSNSGA-II outperformed some recent GA based multi-objective optimization algorithms for MOMRWA problem in terms of the solution quality.