An Improved ACO Algorithm for Multicast in Ad Hoc Networks

Multicast is important development of Ad hoc networks. But a route discovery is one of difficult problems of multicast routing protocol. Recently, many intelligent algorithms had been applied to find a route. Ant colony optimization routing algorithm (ACO) is typical one of them. However, ACO which is applied in the multicast has its limitation, which is the route to multiobjective can not be found at the same time. In this paper, an improved scheme named CACO for multicast in Ad hoc networks is proposed. Some ant will be copied to find the routing from the contrary direction when a ant reaches a receiver node. After that the original ant will continue to find other multicast destinations with the same operating. The simulation results show that CACO can not only reduce the detention of finding multiobjective but also improve the convergence rate of the ant colony algorithm.