METAHEURISTIC ALGORITHMS FOR OPTIMIZATION OF SURVIVABLE MULTICAST OVERLAY IN DUAL HOMING NETWORKS

Abstract

Overlay multicasting providing live streaming services is a crucial service for the contemporary Internet. In this article, we focus on applying overlay multicasting for delivery of critical data that must be transmitted safely, intact, and with as little delay as possible; for example, financial data, software security patches, antivirus signature database updates, etc. To improve survivability of overlay multicasting, we propose using a dual homing approach; that is, each peer is connected to the overlay by two separate access links. We consider the following network failures: overlay link failure, uploading node failure, and Internet server provider (ISP) interconnection failure. The objective is to minimize the maximum delay in the network. The optimization problem is formulated in the form of an integer linear programming (ILP) model. We introduce a simulated annealing (SA) algorithm and a tabu search (TS) algorithm for the considered problem and compare them with optimal results provided by CPLEX solver. Our studies demonstrate that both SA and TS methods yield results close to optimal and provide better scalability compared to CPLEX, because they can solve much larger problem instances than CPLEX in reasonable time. Furthermore, our studies show that the additional survivability requirements do not have a substantial impact on the overlay multicasting system expressed as the maximum delay.