An Improved MOEA/D for QoS Oriented Multimedia Multicasting with Network Coding

Abstract

Recent years witness a significant growth in multimedia applications. Among them, a stream of applications is real-time and requires one-to-many fast data transmission with stringent quality-of-service (QoS) requirements, where multicast is an important supporting technology. In particular, with more and more mobile end users requesting real-time broadband multimedia applications, it is of vital importance to provide them with satisfied quality of experience. As network coding can offer higher bandwidth to users and accommodate more flows for networks than traditional routing, this paper studies the multicast routing problem with network coding and formulates it as a multi-objective optimization problem. As delay and packet loss ratio (PLR) are two important performance indicators for QoS, we consider them as the two objectives for minimization. To address the problem above, we present a multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based on decomposition (MOEA/D), where an all population updating rule is devised to address the problem of lacking feasible solutions in the search space. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm and it outperforms a number of state-of-the-art algorithms.