Ant Colony-Based Load Balancing Algorithm for Multi-Source Multicast Networks

Abstract

IP multicast protocols tend to construct a single minimum spanning tree for a multicast source (i.e., group), in which only a few internal nodes supply multicast traffic. In multicast networks especially with multiple multicast sources where bottleneck effects may occur frequently, frequently used multicast service leads to inefficient network utilization problems. This paper presents a new network utilization algorithm for multicasting called load distribution algorithm (LDA). The LDA algorithm uses selecting candidate path based on ant colony algorithm and multicast scheduling to distribute the contention multicast packets onto their corresponding candidate paths. The numerical results show that a multicast protocol with LDA has higher efficiency of resource utilization and meanwhile maintains less end to end delay compared with the original one without LDA.