Multicast Tree Generation Using Tabu Search

The research and industrial communities have recently been striving to make the Internet capable of supporting multicast traffic sources. A multicast tree for a given multicast source is a tree rooted at the source and all its leaves being members in the multicast group. Tree cost is measured by the utilization of tree links. The problem to be solved is to find a minimum cost multicast tree. This problem has been proven to be NP-Complete. In this paper, we present a Tabu Search algorithm to construct a minimum-cost multicast tree. The proposed algorithm is compared with other existing multicast algorithms. Results show that on almost all test cases, Tabu Search algorithm exhibits more intelligent search of the solution subspace and is able to find better solutions than other reported multicast algorithms.