Research On QoS Multicast Routing Based On Mobile Agents

The phenomenal growth of multicast-based multimedia applications over the Internet has accelerated the need for scalable and efficient network support. These group-based applications include video conferencing, video-on-demand, and so on. Besides scalable and efficient network support, they also demand various QoS requirements in terms of end-to-end delay, delay jitter, and loss. However, due to lack of information classification and effective management, the traditional best-effort service mode is probable to cause congestion and low performance. An additional dimension to the multicast routing problem is the need to construct trees that will satisfy the QoS requirements of modern networked multimedia applications (delay, delay jitter, loss, etc.), which has been established as NP-complete.Introducing mobile agent into routing system makes the network more flexible and adaptable. This paper proposes a mobile agent-based QoS multicast routing algorithm. The algorithm combined the flexibility of mobile agents and the swarm intelligence of ant system, to build a minimal-cost multicast tree under QoS constraints. The designing and implementing issues in the algorithm include: the data structure of network nodes and mobile agents, the dynamics of various mobile agents, and the full procedure of tree-building. After that, a simulation platform is introduced, and with which the proposed algorithm is simulated. The simulation result demonstrates the availability and effectiveness of this algorithm.