A new quality of service multicast routing protocol based on genetic algorithm

Multicast service is becoming a key requirement of computer networks supporting multimedia applications. For multimedia applications, the routing algorithms should consider many quality of service (QoS) parameters such as delay, cost and so on to find a new route. However, to find routes with two or more QoS parameters is a NP-hard problem. Therefore, many researchers are trying to use heuristic methods such as genetic algorithm (GA) to find good routes satisfying application request. In a previous work, a QoS multicast routing based on GA was proposed. The routing algorithm uses as QoS parameters for multicasting the delay and cost. However, in this algorithm, the multicast routing falls in the local minimum and can not satisfy the application requirement. In this paper, we propose a new QoS multicast routing protocol which has better genetic operations than the conventional algorithm, resulting in a better search success ratio and computation time compared with the conventional algorithm.