The Topology-aware Ant Colony Optimization algorithm based on Forest Growth for IPTV live service

IPTV live service has strict requirements of QoS. IP Multicast is an effective technology, but the limited availability of IP Multicast in the Internet motives researchers to apply application-layer multicast to implement IPTV live service. In application-layer multicast, applications arrange themselves as a logical tree. The application-layer multicast for IPTV live service can be modeled as the minimum diameter, degree-bounded spanning tree (MDDBST) problem. However, application-layer multicast is a Peer-to-Peer (P2P) style. Applications don´t have information of the underlying network topology and select distant peers, which generates much unnecessary traffic. Thus in the application-layer multicast for IPTV live service application-layer traffic optimization (ALTO) should be also considered. This paper proposes a Topology-aware Ant Colony Optimization algorithm based on Forest Growth (TACOF) which is mesh-first solution to solve the MDDBST problem considering ALTO. The results of a series of simulations show the effectiveness of the proposed solution.