Multicast routing with quality of service and traffic engineering requirements in the Internet, based on genetic algorithm

In order to deal with the high computational power required by the QoS routing, the use of genetic algorithm (GA) as a method to obtain the appropriate routes has been presented in various works. The GA discussed in this work was adapted from the model presented by Erdun et al. (2001), that uses bandwidth, delay and cost as metrics to evaluate the routes. Two innovations were incorporated in the GA in order to attend traffic engineering requirements: inclusion of the metric number of steps (or hops) in the route evaluation, and a mechanism to avoid the generation of repeated individuals producing several optimal and sub-optimal routes. In order to test the proposed genetic algorithm, two examples of network topology were used. The results indicate that the GA discussed in this work converges to the global optimal solution, while the implementations discussed in Ravikumar et al. (1998) and Erdun et al. did not reach it. Besides, even in the runs that the GA did not converge to the global optimum, sub-optimal solutions that attend to the constraint delay were obtained with a small increment in the cost.