An Multicast Routing Based on Ant Colony Optimization Algorithm for DTN

Delay tolerant networks (DTNs) are a class of emerging networks that experience frequent and long-duration partitions. Multicast supports the distribution of data to a group of users, a service needed for many potential DTN applications, due to the unique characteristic of frequent partitioning in DTNs, multicasting in DTNs is a considerably different and challenging problem. In this paper, The mathematics model for DTNs is established, and the ant colony optimization algorithm introduce to solve the multicast problem.A multicast routing based on ant colony optimization algorithm-MRACO is proposed in this paper.Simulation results show that our multicast routing MRACO can not only have a higher delivery ratio and lower delay, but also have a lower data forwarding cost, in terms of the number of relays used.