Using particle swam optimization for QoS in ad-hoc multicast

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of self-organized mobile nodes that are capable of communicating with each other without the aid of any established infrastructure or centralized administration. Multicasting plays a very important role in the application of ad hoc networks. As the number of participants increases, scalability of the multicast protocol becomes an important issue. When considering the increasing demand of Quality-of-Service (QoS) requirements in many applications, the existing multicast routing protocols used for ad-hoc network should be adapted appropriately to effectively meet the stringent QoS requirements of specific multimedia traffic. We thus propose a multicast routing protocol which tries its best to meet the variation of behavior of network topology and satisfy QoS requirements of specific multimedia traffic using particle swam optimization (PSO) in the volatile environments of a MANET. Meanwhile, a priority scheduler with PSO is also proposed to make scheduling decisions so that the packet loss rate can be further reduced. The results of a series of simulations exhibit the practicability and feasibility of our protocol.