Multiple shared trees multicast based on set covering and Ant Colony Optimization

Single shared tree and source rooted trees are two extreme approaches for the many-to-many multicast applications. These two approaches complement each other in terms of performance, protocol overhead and robustness. The problem we faced is to construct multiple shared trees for many-to-many multicast applications and reduce the management costs by minimizing the number of shared trees, which can be transformed into the set covering problem which is proved NP-complete. Then an Ant Colony Optimization(ACO) algorithm for multiple shared trees multicast based on set covering (MSTSC) is presented in this paper. Simulation experiments indicate ACO algorithm for MSTSC is efficiency and feasible.