Ant colony-based algorithm for constructing broadcasting tree with degree and delay constraints

Heterogeneous ISP router policies prevent multimedia QoS applications, such as real-time media streaming, video conferencing, and distance learning, that require IP layer multicasting from wide deployment on the Internet. Thus, recent efforts have applied application layer multicast to implement such applications by organizing the multicast group in an overlay (virtual), peer-to-peer network. Such a communication scheme can be regarded as a broadcasting problem with degree and delay constraints in the overlay network. The degree and delay-constrained broadcasting problem with minimum-cost appears to be NP-complete. This study proposes an ant colony-based algorithm to solve the difficult broadcasting problem and compares it with some related methods. The results of a series of simulations show the efficiency and effectiveness of the proposed algorithm.