An Improved Ant Colony Algorithm Based on Numbers of Target Nodes on Routes.

Multicast technology is one of the key technologies of wireless mesh network (MSN) and it can improve the efficiency of transmitting information significantly. This paper introduces the main steps of multicast and points out that ant colony algorithm (ANA) is an efficient heuristic algorithm for constructing a multicast tree. The traditional ANA is analyzed qualitatively and improved by taking the target nodes on one route under consideration when calculating the route's cost and updating the pheromone. The more target nodes on one route, the faster the increasing rate of pheromone on this route. The simulation results of two examples show that the improved algorithm can reduce the cost and price by 28.57% and 22.36% respectively compared with ANA, thus improving the performance of multicast system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]