A New Multi-Objective QoS Multicast Routing Protocol Based on Ant Colony Optimization for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In this paper, we modified our previous published protocol SROQRP, Stable and Reliable On-Demand QoS Routing Protocol based on Ant Colony Optimization for mobile Ad-hoc networks (MANET), to support group oriented routing. The advent of ubiquitous computing and the proliferation of portable computing devices have raised the importance of mobile and wireless networking, at the same time, the popularity of group-oriented computing has grown tremendously. Our new protocol named MSROQRP, Stable and Reliable On-Demand QoS Routing Protocol based on Ant Colony Optimization for Multicast in MANET, our main goal is to benefit from our previously published protocol advantages in multicast (group oriented) applications for MANET. The new protocol bringing together the technologies for group-oriented communication and mobile networking with full support of quality of service, the major challenge lies in adapting multicast communication to environments where mobility is unlimited and outages/failures are frequent. This protocol considers the multicast routing as a multi-objective problem, as it minimizes the cost of the multicast tree under multiple constraints, prolongs the network lifetime and increases routing reliability. It estimates path stability in order to use it in the transition probability to increase routing stability and it combines the bandwidth, delay and hop count in the pheromone updating rule to satisfy the QoS requirements.