Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393

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Computer Communications
journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/comcom

A multi-granularity evolution based Quantum Genetic Algorithm for QoS

multicast routing problem in WDM networks
Huanlai Xing, Xin Liu, Xing Jin, Lin Bai, Yuefeng Ji *
Key Laboratory of Optical Communication and Lightwave Technologies, Ministry of Education, Beijing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Beijing 100876, PR China

a r t i c l e i n f o a b s t r a c t

Article history: QoS multicast routing problem in WDM networks is investigated, and an improved algorithm Multi-gran-
Received 18 April 2008 ularity Evolution based Quantum Genetic Algorithm (MEQGA) is proposed to address it. Based on Quan-
Received in revised form 7 November 2008 tum Genetic Algorithm (QGA) with quantum rotation gate strategy, MEQGA introduces multi-granularity
Accepted 7 November 2008
evolution mechanism, which allows different chromosomes of one generation to have different rotation
Available online 18 November 2008
angle step values to update. In term of this mechanism, MEQGA can significantly improve its capability of
exploration and exploitation, since its optimization performance does not over-depend on the single
Keywords:
rotation angle step scheme shared by all chromosomes any longer. MEQGA also presents an adaptive
WDM
Multicast
quantum mutation operation which is able to avoid local search efficiently. A repair method is applied
Quality of service to eliminate illegal graphs as many as possible hence more excellent solutions will appear in each evo-
Quantum Genetic Algorithm lutionary generation. Simulation results show that, for the QoS multicast routing problem, MEQGA out-
performs other heuristic algorithms and is characterized by robustness, high success ratio, fast
convergence and excellent capability on global searching.
Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

1. Introduction
With the exponentially growing demand for high speed, large
capacity data transmission in modern communication networks
and the maturity of Wavelength Division Multiplexing (WDM)
technologies, the WDM based optical networks (also called WDM
networks), which enable many wavelengths available to transmit
data in a fiber so as to make use of the potential and dramatically
large transmission capacity of the fiber, become one natural solu-
tion for the Next Generation Internet (NGI) backbone [1]. Accord-
ing to the evolution trend of optical network, least cost multicast
and Quality of Service (QoS) are required as essential capabilities.
So, WDM networks should possess QoS multicast capability in
optical layer. However, least-cost QoS multicast routing problem
has been proved to be NP-hard [2], and it is solved by finding a
Minimum Steiner Tree satisfying QoS constraints.
To solve the above problem, some heuristic approaches have
been proposed [3–9]. A degree-and-delay constrained minimum-
cost broadcasting algorithm based on GA has been proposed in
[3]. An overlay multicast routing scheme which is also based on
GA has been presented in [4]. However, the above two schemes
may sometimes be trapped in local search due to the inherent
shortcomings of GA, such as, pre-maturity, slow convergence
speed, weak global searching capability, and so on. In [5,6], Tabu-
* Corresponding author. Tel./fax: +86 10 62282127.
E-mail address: jyf@bupt.edu.cn (Y. Ji).
search and immune based algorithms have been adopted for
multicast routing problem. Nevertheless, they are complex to be
operated. An optical-internet-oriented multicast routing scheme
based on neural networks has been provided in [7]. Poor optimiza-
tion performance may be obtained, since the values of correlative
coefficients are hard to be determined. In addition, an optical-
internet-oriented multicast scheme based on procession competi-
tion evolutionary algorithm has been introduced [8]. Though it is
feasible and effective, the selection of the compatible probability
of mutation for each chromosome is quite difficult. Another shrink-
ing-chaotic-mutation evolutionary algorithm has been presented
to construct a least cost light-tree for multicast services [9]. How-
ever, the performance of mutation operation may not be stable.
In recent years, Quantum Genetic Algorithm (QGA), a combina-
tion of quantum computation and GA, is proposed [10–17]. Explo-
ration and exploitation can be provided simultaneously when
suitable evolution parameter values are selected. Since rotation
angle step (RAS) of quantum rotation gate (QRG1) has a great effect
on the convergence speed of QGA, the selection of suitable RAS
schemes is quite crucial [10]. However, it seems difficult to verify
whether a RAS scheme is fit for a practical problem especially for
the first time. In [10–13], the fixed rotation angle step (called FRAS
below) schemes have been put forward. For arbitrary evolution gen-
eration, if any two chromosomes are under the same case according
to lookup table, they use the same RAS value to evolve. QGA with
1
In QGA, QRG is an important operator which is capable of updating populations.

0140-3664/$ - see front matter Ó 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.
doi:10.1016/j.comcom.2008.11.009
 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393 387

FRAS scheme may often result in slow convergence speed since the WDM network, and |K(e)| is the number of current available
RAS values of lookup table never change. Later, the dynamic rotation wavelengths of edge e. Suppose there is always sufficient available
angle step (called DRAS below) schemes are proposed in [14–16], wavelength resource to establish a multicast tree when the source
where new RAS schemes will be given at each generation. By DRAS node and destination nodes are given. Assume the source s is able
schemes, the searching grid of QGA varies from large to small, and to know the topology and wavelength resource information of the
it is of some help to accelerate the convergence and achieve better entire WDM network. Source routing method is used in this paper.
optimal solutions. However, to determine the RAS values of the In order to balance the network load, the edge cost C(e) is defined
beginning generation is also somewhat difficult but important. as C(e) = Me + 1  |K(e)|, where Me is the number of maximum
If we define that Single-granularity Evolution (SE) mechanism is available wavelengths of edge e. This means that the employment
a mechanism in which all chromosomes of each generation use the of an edge with less available wavelengths will be more expensive.
same RAS scheme to evolve themselves, we can see that all the Let s 2 V and D # {V  {s}} be the source and the multicast
QGA algorithms above utilize SE mechanism. Under this mecha- destinations, respectively. For arbitrary di 2 D, the delay, delay
nism, the optimization performance of the above algorithms may jitter, bandwidth and packet loss rate of the path p(s, di) from s to
over-depend on the selection of RAS values of each generation. di is shown as
Unless the RAS values can be assigned properly, suboptimal solu- X X
Dðpðs; di ÞÞ ¼ DðeÞ þ DðnÞ ð1Þ
tions could appear easily. Mutation is an effective operation to
e2pðs;di Þ n2pðs;di Þ
prevent premature convergence and raise global search capability. X
However, it is not adopted as a basic evolution operation in con- DJðpðs; di ÞÞ ¼ DJðnÞ ð2Þ
n2pðs;di Þ
ventional QGA. Although, quantum mutation operations are intro-
duced in [13,17], the differences among individuals are not taken Bðpðs; di ÞÞ ¼ MinimizefBðeÞj8e 2 pðs; di Þg ð3Þ
Y
into consideration so that the algorithm may sometimes be PLðpðs; di ÞÞ ¼ 1  ð1  PLðeÞÞ ð4Þ
trapped in local search. e2pðs;di Þ
In order to provide an effective QoS multicast routing scheme in [
Kðpðs; di ÞÞ ¼ KðeÞ ð5Þ
WDM networks and overcome the problems caused by SE mecha- e2pðs;di Þ
nism and conventional quantum mutation operation, this paper of-
fers a new parallel evolutionary algorithm called Multi-granularity According to the above expressions, the QoS parameters of the
Evolution based Quantum Genetic Algorithm (MEQGA). Compared corresponding multicast tree T(s, D) are defined as below
with SE mechanism, the Multi-granularity Evolution (ME) mecha-
DðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ MaximizefDðpðs; di ÞÞj8di 2 Dg ð6Þ
nism assigns different RAS schemes to different chromosomes.
Thus, the case that the efficiency of the algorithm over-depends
DJðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ MaximizefDJðpðs; di ÞÞj8di 2 Dg ð7Þ
on one RAS scheme will never exist, and therefore it is no longer BðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ MinimizefBðpðs; di ÞÞj8di 2 Dg ð8Þ
necessary to find one very good RAS scheme which is actually dif- PLðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ MaximizefPLðpðs; di ÞÞj8di 2 Dg ð9Þ
ficult to be selected. When adaptive quantum mutation (AQM) [
KðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ Kðpðs; di ÞÞ ð10Þ
operation is implemented, the differences among individuals are di 2D
taken into full consideration, and therefore pre-maturity is avoided X
CðTðs; DÞÞ ¼ CðeÞ ð11Þ
dramatically. We have confirmed the performance of MEQGA on
e2Tðs;DÞ
QoS multicast routing problem and designed a repair method to
generate legal solutions as many as possible in decoding step. Sim-
ulation results show that our algorithm performs at least as well as 2.2. Mathematical formulation
and usually better than other existing algorithms in terms of
robustness, success ratio, convergence and global search capability. Given a QoS multicast request R(s, D, DR, DJR, BR, PLR), where s is
the source, D is the set of destinations, DR, DJR, BR and PLR are the
constraints of delay, delay jitter, bandwidth and packet loss rate,
2. Problem description respectively, the objective of QoS multicast routing problem is to
minimize the cost of the established multicast tree with the QoS
In this section we describe the model of WDM networks and the requirements guaranteed, as the following shows:
mathematical formulation of QoS multicast routing, respectively. Objective:
Minimize CðTðs; DÞÞ ð12Þ
2.1. WDM network model
Subject to:
A WDM network can be modeled as an undirected graph [8]
DðTðs; DÞÞ 6 DR ð13Þ
G = (V, E), where V and E are the sets of optical nodes and links rep-
resenting optical fibers, respectively. For each optical node n 2 V, DJðTðs; DÞÞ 6 DJ R ð14Þ
assume n has unlimited multicast capacity so that incoming optical BðTðs; DÞÞ P BR ð15Þ
signal can be split into arbitrary number of copies. Suppose some PLðTðs; DÞÞ 6 PLR ð16Þ
nodes among Vare equipped with wavelength converter so that
they could send out the original signal with another wavelength
in order to avoid collision. Given an arbitrary n 2 V, it is associated
with the following parameters: D(n), and DJ(n) representing its 3. Overview of QGA
delay and delay jitter, respectively. Where D(n) consists of the Pro-
cessing delay DP(n) and WC delay DWC(n) (if there is no WC, set QGA is a probabilistic searching algorithm which exploits the
DWC(n) = 0). For each edge e 2 E, consider the following parame- power of quantum computation in order to accelerate genetic pro-
ters: B(e), D(e), PL(e), C(e), K(e) denoting its available bandwidth, cedures. The basic unit of information in QGA is called quantum-bit
propagation delay, packet loss ratio, cost and the set of current (qubit). A qubit is a two-level quantum system which may be in
available wavelengths, respectively, where K(e) # K, K is the the |1i state, in the |0i state, or in any superposition of the two.
set of available wavelength ki (i = 1, 2, . . . , M) employed by the The state of a qubit can be represented as
388 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393

j/i ¼ aj0i þ bj1i ð17Þ Table 1

Lookup table of conventional RAS scheme.
2 2
where |a| + |b| = 1, a and b are complex numbers that specify the
xi bi f ðXÞ P f ðX tbest Þ Dhi
probability amplitudes of the corresponding state.
A qubit representation of m-qubit chromosome is defined as 0 0 False d1
0 0 True d2
follows:
0 1 False d3
    
a1  a2      am 0 1 True d4
ð18Þ 1 0 False
b1  b2      bm
d5
1 0 True d6
1 1 False d7
where |ai|2 + |bi|2 = 1, i = 1, 2, . . . , m. In this way, the m-qubit chromo-
1 1 True d8
some can represent the information of 2m states simultaneously.
Thanks to the qubit representation, QGA has a better characteristic Here f(*) is the profit, bi and xi are the ith bits of the best solution X tbest and the
current solution X, respectively. Dhi denotes RAS of hi.
of population diversity than classical approaches, since it can repre-
sent a linear superposition of many states. For example, the 2-bit
binary expression (0, 1) represents one state while 2-bit qubit
 pffiffiffi 

 the rth bit of X ti is set to be 1, otherwise, it is set to be 0. Each solu-
expression 1=p2 ffiffiffi  p1=2
ffiffiffi represents four states:, 18 h0; 0i, 38 h0; 1i, tion X ti is a binary string of length m, and is evaluated to give some
1= 2 3=2
1
and 38 h1; 1i, where 18, 38, 18, and 38 are probabilities, according
h1; 0i, measure of its fitness. The initial best solution X tbest is then selected
8
to which the corresponding states will emerge. and stored among the binary solutions P(t). In the while loop, the
For update, suitable quantum gate U(h) is usually adopted in quantum gate U(h) is used to update Q(t  1) so that fitter states
compliance with practical optimization problems. For the QoS of the qubit chromosomes are generated. The jth qubit value
multicast routing problem, quantum rotation gate (QRG), such ðatj ; btj Þ2 of qti is updated as
as " # " # " #" #
atþ1
j atj cosðhtj Þ  sinðhtj Þ atj
  ¼ Uðhtj Þ ¼ ð21Þ
cosðhÞ  sinðhÞ bjtþ1 btj sinðhtj Þ cosðhtj Þ btj
UðhÞ ¼ ð19Þ
sinðhÞ cosðhÞ
Here, htj is the rotation angle of qti . The best solution among P(t) is
where h is rotation angle, is used as a basic gate of QGA. selected in the next step, and if the current solution is fitter than
Then let’s briefly review the procedure of QGA, please referred the best stored solution X tbest , the best stored solution X tbest is
to [10] for details. replaced by this current solution.

1. Procedure QGA 4. The proposed algorithm

2. begin
3. t 0 This section provides an efficient QoS multicast routing
4. initialize Q(t) scheme which is based on QGA with ME mechanism and AQM
5. make P(t) by observing the states of Q(t) operation. At first, the ME mechanism and AQM operation are
6. evaluate P(t) introduced and discussed. Then, other important components
7. store the best individual among P(t) and its fitness are described. In the end, we give the structure of the proposed
8. while (not termination condition) do algorithm.
9. begin
10. t t+1 4.1. Multi-granularity evolution
11. make P(t) observing the states of Q(t  1)
12. evaluate P(t) As far as we know, the QRG strategy adopts either FRAS scheme
13. update Q(t  1) using suitable quantum gates U(t) or DRAS scheme as its RAS determination scheme. Table 1 shows
14. store the best individual among P(t) and its fitness the conventional RAS scheme.
15. end According to Table 1, if FRAS scheme is used in lookup table, for
16. end every chromosome of every generation, the value of di
(i = 1, 2, . . . , 8) is always the same one. If DRAS is employed in look-
up table, for each generation, the value of di (i = 1, 2, . . . , 8) is regen-
Here, Q ðtÞ ¼ fqt1 ; qt2 ; . . . ; qtN g is a population of N qubit chromo- erated according to the current generation. But all chromosomes of
somes at generation t, and qti is the ith (i = 1, 2, . . . , N) individual de- the current generation still share the same di (i = 1, 2, . . . , 8) value.
fined as Both of the above RAS schemes belong to SE mechanism (refer to
    
ati1  ati2      atim Section 1 in this paper) in which all individuals of the same gener-
qti ¼ ð20Þ
bti1  bti2      btim ation utilize the same di (i = 1, 2, . . . , 8) value. According to SE, indi-
viduals may fail to reach optimum solutions in short iteration if
And PðtÞ ¼ fX t1 ; X t2 ; . . . ; X tN g is a set of binary solutions of observation RAS is excessively small, or they may miss optimum solutions if
states Q(t), where X ti is the binary solution by observing RAS is excessively large. Therefore the characteristic of algorithm’s
qti ði ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; NÞ. In the ‘initialize Q(t)’ step, each pair of qubit prob- convergence will over-depend on the selection of RAS of each gen-
ability amplitudes, atir and btir , r = 1, 2, . . . , m, are initialized with eration which is usually tough to be determined.
pffiffiffi
1= 2; 8qti 2 Q ðtÞ. The following step makes a set of binary solutions In order to address the above problem and achieve better
PðtÞ ¼ fX t1 ; X t2 ; . . . ; X tN g, where each bit of X ti , i = 1, 2, . . . , N, is formed optimum solutions, Multi-granularity Evolution (ME) mechanism
by determining the explicit state of each qubit of qti , |0> state or is introduced. In contrast with SE mechanism, at each genera-
tion, ME mechanism determines a numerical range NRi for each
|1> state, according to either jatir j2 or jbtir j2 of qti , r = 1, 2, . . . , m. For
di (i = 1, 2, . . . , 8), and selects a number of di values from NRi each
example, a number h between 0 and 1 is generated randomly before
the determination of rth bit of X ti ðr ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; mÞ. Then, if h < jbtir j2 ,
2
For simplification, hereafter we use ðatj ; btj Þ to represent the jth qubit of qti .
 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393 389

Thanks to ME mechanism, MEQGA increases the granularity

of evolution so that the algorithm’s convergence speed isn’t lim-
ited by SE mechanism any longer and the best solution is
achieved in less computing time. Moreover, ME mechanism sim-
plifies the determination of dji since it is easier to determine a
possible numerical range than a certain value. In addition, the
numerical range is related to evolutionary generations so that
the algorithm can also make full use of the advantages of DRAS
strategy.

4.2. Adaptive quantum mutation

Here, adaptive quantum mutation (AQM) based on quantum

NOT gate in [17] is proposed. It generates a particular mutation
Fig. 1. Comparison of SE mechanism and ME mechanism. Both the elliptic area on probability for each individual, based on fitness values of the
the lift side and the one on the right side represent the same numerical range NRi, current generation. In this paper, the quantum mutation probabil-
and the value of dji ði ¼ 1; 2; . . . ; 8Þ belong to the NRi. ity pm(i) of the ith individual is defined as
(
D  C dis  ðfmax  fi Þ=ðfmax  f Þ; fmax –f
pm ðiÞ ¼ ð24Þ
Table 2 D; fmax ¼ f
Lookup table of rotation angle.

xji bi f ðXÞ P f ðX tbest Þ Dhij Sðaji ; bji Þ where D 2 [0, 1] is a constant determined at the beginning of the
aji bji > 0 aji bji < 0 aji ¼ 0 bji ¼ 0
algorithm, Cdis is disturbance coefficient which will be set larger
than 1 when the best solution is still the same one for a certain
0 0 False dj1 ¼ 0 – – – –
number of generations, and it is initialized with ‘1’, fmax, f and fi rep-
0 0 True dj2 ¼ 0 – – – –
resent the maximum fitness value, the average fitness value and the
0 1 False dj3 ¼ 0 +1 1 0 ±1 ith chromosome of the current generation, respectively.
0 1 True dj4 ¼ 0 1 +1 ±1 0 The better the individual is, the smaller the assigned mutation
1 0 False dj5 ¼ 0 1 +1 ±1 0 probability will be, and the best individual of the current genera-
1 0 True dj6 ¼ 0 +1 1 0 ±1 tion will be reserved. Based on AQM mechanism, the excellent
1 1 False dj7 ¼ 0 – – – – chromosomes have more chance to reserve, while the bad ones
1 1 True dj8 ¼ 0 – – – – are more likely to mutate, hence fast convergence is gained and
pre-maturity is avoided. Disturbance coefficient is introduced,
f(*) is the profit, and bi and xji
are the ith bits of the best solution X tbest
and the
and therefore global searching capability is enhanced.
current solution Xj, respectively. Sðaji ; bji Þ is the sign of hji , and Dhji denotes RAS of hji .

4.3. Chromosome representation

Before mapping QoS multicast routing problem to qubit chro-

time to update the population. Assume there are N individuals.
mosomes, the links without enough bandwidth will be cut off from
Number them from 1 to N. The jth individual uses dji , the original topology graph. Then, based on the new subgraph, the
i = 1, 2, . . . , 8, j = 1, 2, . . . , N, to evolve itself at generation t0. Fig. 1
k shortest path algorithm in [18] is adopted to find a Candidate
shows the difference between SE mechanism and ME mecha- Path Set w(s, di) containing at most k number (here we suppose
nism. Obviously, under the SE mechanism, no matter how many
the number is z) of candidate shortest paths: w(s, di) = {p1(s, di),
individuals are in the population, only c0 is offered to update p2(s, di), . . . , pz(s, di)} from the source s to each destination
them. But under the ME mechanism, a set of values
di 2 D = {d1, d2, . . . , dw}, i = 1, 2, . . . , w. Number the paths in w(s, di)
{c0, c1, . . . , cN1} selected from a certain numerical range are from 1 to z. The same procedure to find a candidate route path
provided.
from s to di is repeated w times so that w candidate route sets
In Table 2, we propose a novel ME mechanism based lookup ta- w(s, d1), w(s, d2), . . . , w(s, dw) are formed.
ble of rotation angle. Since there is only one variable dj in lookup
table, only one numerical range NR is required. The expression of
the dj assigned to jth individual is defined as
 
t
dj ¼ X  Rj  1  g  ð22Þ
MAXGEN

rj ; rj < C R ;
Rj ¼ ð23Þ
1  rj ; rj P C R
where X is a constant between 0.05p and 0.5p, rj 2 [0, 1] is a ran-
dom number which is created for qtj at each generation t,
g 2 [0, 1] is a fixed constant initialized at the initialization step of
MEQGA, MAXGEN represents the value of maximum generation
(i.e. if the evolution process of MEQGA is repeated for 100 times,
the maximum generation is 100, and thus MAXGEN = 100), and
CR 2 [0, 1] is a constant which is used to avoid ineffective
evolution.

t
Note that the NR of the tth generation is from X  1  g  MAXGEN  CR
t

j
to X  1  g  MAXGEN , which implies that all of the d of generation t
come from the certain numerical range NR. Fig. 2. Representation of chromosome.
390 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393

Fig. 3. Three randomly generated network topologies. (a) 20-nodes topology. (b) 40-nodes topology. (c) 60-nodes topology. Here, blue round node represents the source
node, red triangle nodes are destination nodes, and the rest nodes (black square nodes) denote intermediate nodes.

A chromosome consists of w segments, gi (i = 1, 2, . . . , w), where
gi contains N(N P 1 and 2N1 6 z 6 2N) qubits representing 2N
superposition state. The ith segment gi is related to the ith sink
di, i = 1, 2, . . . , w. After the observation of gi, N-bit binary informa-
tion can be generated. By converting the N-bit binary information
to decimal number (here we assume the decimal number is y
where 1 6 y 6 z), a corresponding candidate path py(s, di) 2 w(s, di)
from s to di can be then selected. Hence, measuring a qubit chro-
mosome will achieve a multicast tree covering source and all des-
tination nodes. However, if the decimal number y is larger than z,
no candidate path could be chosen. So, we will regenerate a legal
decimal number 1 6 y 6 z (please refer to Section 4.4 for details).
Meanwhile, the created tree is composed of candidate paths
selected from different w(s, di). Therefore the tree may contain
circles and we also take this case into consideration (please see
Section 4.4). Once the multicast tree is constructed, MEQGA will
verify whether this tree meets the given QoS constraints
(DR, DJR, BR, PLR) and obtain its fitness value. If the constructed tree
can not satisfy the QoS constraints, penalty function is introduced
(see Section 4.6 for details).
Fig. 2 gives an example to show the process of chromosome
representation. B denotes Binary string, and D denotes Decimal
number. The number of candidate paths from s to di is three. Since
two-qubit segment gi can represent four states, it is sufficient to
index all the candidate paths. Aftergi is measured, a two-bit binary
string which represents a route path number selected from s to di
after Binary-to-Decimal conversion is formed. Note that if the bin-
ary string ‘11’ appears, it is considered as illegal number since it is
not related to any of the candidate route paths (see Section 4.4 for
solutions).
4.4. A repair method for decoding
The observation state of each chromosome is a queue of binary
numbers, which is expected to represent a multicast tree covering
the source and all destination nodes. However, two cases which

Table 3
Simulation results of the four algorithms.

Algorithms Multicast Scenarios

T1: (20-nodes, 69-links) T2: (40-nodes, 130-links) T3: (60-nodes, 187-links)
Case1 Case2 Case1 Case2 Case1 Case2
DR = 50 ms, DR = 40 ms, DR = 70 ms, DR = 65 ms, DR = 85 ms, DR = 65 ms,
DJR = 10 ms, DJR = 8 ms, DJR = 12 ms, DJR = 10 ms, DJR = 15 ms, DJR = 10 ms,
BR = 20 Mbps, BR = 30 Mbps, BR = 30 Mbps, BR = 35 Mbps, BR = 20 Mbps, BR = 40 Mbps,
PLR = 0.7% PLR = 0.5% PLR = 0.9% PLR = 0.7% PLR = 1% PLR = 0.8%

MSR MBTC MSR MBTC MSR MBTC MSR MBTC MSR MBTC MSR MBTC
CGA 98.4% 200.63 95.6% 252.6 88.9% 492.8 77.5% 585.6 81.4% 1050.6 76.8% 1241.7
CQGA 100% 194.0 100% 249.4 92.5% 469.4 88.3% 554.3 86.9% 1001.4 84.8% 1183.9
MEQGA1 100% 194.0 100% 249.0 96.4% 427.2 94.6% 528.2 96.3% 973.1 93.0% 1139.2
MEQGA2 100% 194.0 100% 249.0 98.9% 416.9 96.7% 522.7 97.9% 964.7 95.3% 1121.5

Here, DR, DJR, BR, and PLR are QoS constraints of delay, delay jitter, bandwidth and packet loss ratio, respectively (refer to Section 2.2). MSR represents Multicast Success Ratio.
By running an algorithm (CGA, CQGA, MEQGA1 or MEQGA2) once, one best multicast tree T(s, D) and its corresponding cost Cost(T(s, D)) can be obtained. So, by repeating an
algorithm 2000 times, 2000 best multicast trees will be achieved. Among these best multicast trees, some of them do violate the given QoS constraints while others (suppose
there are W such trees) meet the constraints. We calculate the mean cost of the eligible W trees and the result is what we call MBTC (Mean Best-Tree-Cost). The smaller the
MBTC is, the better the optimization performance of the corresponding algorithm will be.
 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393 391

may lead to illegal graphs should be taken into account when
decoding is implemented. The problems and their repair solutions
are given as
(1) If some of the decoded path numbers may exceed the avail-
able path numbers (see Fig. 2 as an example), the algorithm
can’t map this illegal number to a candidate path. A new
available path number is created randomly to replace the
illegal number.
(2) Suppose all the path numbers are legal ones, some graphs
may still contain circles. Prim algorithm is introduced to
eliminate the useless edges, so that the graphs are ensured
to be legal trees after decoding.
4.5. Wavelength assignment
In WDM networks, the wavelengths must be pre-assigned to
the multicast tree before data transmission. The wavelength
assignment algorithm in [7] is used for pre-assigning wavelengths
to its corresponding tree T(s, D) with each chromosome.
4.6. Fitness function
The fitness function is defined as below, where penalty function
is adopted to deal with the chromosomes which violate QoS
constraints.
fi ¼ ð1 þ CD þ CDJ þ CPL Þ  CostðTðs; DÞÞ ð25Þ
Here CD, CDJ, and CPL are penalty factors of delay, delay jitter,
and packet loss ratio, respectively. Since the links which do not
have enough bandwidth have been eliminated from the given
topologies, it is no use considering bandwidth penalty factor. If
a chromosome satisfies all QoS constraints, CD, CDJ, and CPL are
set to be 0. Otherwise, if any of the QoS constraints (DR, DJR, or
PLR) is broken, the corresponding penalty factor (CD, CDJ, or
CPL) is set to be a positive value between 0 and 1. Hence, once
the constructed multicast tree T(s, D) can not meet all QoS
requirements, the value of the expression (1 + CD + CDJ + CPL) is
larger than 1 where the value of fi outweighs the actual cost
of T(s, D).

Fig. 4. Performance comparison of CGA, CQGA, MEQGA1 and MEQGA2 in the six cases. (a) MBTC vs. Generation in T1-Case1. (b) MBTC vs. Generation in T2-Case1. (c) MBTC vs.
Generation in T3-Case1. (d) MBTC vs. Generation in T1-Case2. (e) MBTC vs. Generation in T2-Case2. (f) MBTC vs. Generation in T3-Case2.
392 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393

Fig. 5. The best multicast trees achieved in the six cases. (a) The best tree found in T1-Case1. (b) The best tree found in T2-Case1. (c) The best tree found in T3-Case1. (d) The
best tree found in T1-Case2. (e) The best tree found in T2-Case2. (f) The best tree found in T3-Case2. Here, blue round node is the source node, red triangle nodes are
destination nodes, and the rest nodes denote intermediate nodes. (For interpretation of the references to colour in this figure legend, the reader is referred to the web version
of this article.)

4.7. Structure of the proposed algorithm gence speed of the algorithm; (2) quantum mutation operation
AQM is introduced so as to prevent the algorithm from local
As each part of the algorithm has been already introduced in de- search; (3) a repair method is proposed for decoding in the step
tails, the basic steps of the algorithm can be described as follows: of ‘evaluate P(t)’ to turn illegal graphs to legal ones as many as
possible.
1. Procedure MEQGA
2. begin 5. Simulation results
3. t 0
4. initialize Q(t) In order to evaluate the performance of our algorithm, compar-
5. make P(t) by observing the states of Q(t) isons of CGA, CQGA, MEQGA without AQM operation (called it
6. evaluate P(t) MEQGA1 below), and MEQGA with AQM operation (called it MEQ-
7. store the best individual among P(t) and its fitness GA2 below) are executed in six different QoS constrain cases of
8. while (not termination condition) do three network topologies: T1 (20-nodes, 69-links), T2 (40-nodes,
9. begin 130-links) and T3 (60-nodes, 187-links) constructed by Waxman’s
10. t t+1 algorithm [19]. Fig. 3 and Table 3 show the three randomly gener-
11. make P(t) observing the states of Q(t  1) ated network topologies and the QoS constraints of six cases,
12. evaluate P(t) respectively.
13. update Q(t  1) using ME based quantum gates U(t) Assume the wavelength conversion delay between any two
14. store the best individual among P(t) and its fitness wavelengths at all nodes vi 2 V is 1 ms. Number the optical nodes
15. carry out AQM operation by their degrees. The node with larger degree has smaller number.
16. end Assume the former 40 percent of the nodes sorted by numbers
17. end have wavelength conversion ability. Suppose the maximum num-
ber of the available wavelengths in the experimental WDM net-
work is 40, and the current available wavelength number of link
The procedure of MEQGA is similar to that of QGA except for e, |K(e)|(e 2 E), is a number between 1 and 40. Then, the cost of
three differences: (1) instead of SE based update, ME based each edge C(e) (refer to C(e) = Me + 1  |K(e)| in Section 2.1) can
quantum gate is adopted to weaken the complexity and diffi- be calculated. Assume all of the QoS parameters of optical nodes
culty of selecting the proper RAS and to accelerate the conver- and fibers are uniformly distributed, where bandwidth 2[20, 120]
 H. Xing et al. / Computer Communications 32 (2009) 386–393
Mb/s, packet loss rate 2 [0.05%, 0.5%], delay 2 [1, 5] ms, delay jitter
2 [0.1, 1] ms. The multicast groups are randomly selected from any
of the three topologies. The population size of each algorithm
above is set to be 20. The crossover rate and mutation rate of
CGA are fixed at 0.8 and 0.1, respectively. RAD is set to be 0.5p.
Since multicast success ratio MSR and mean cost of best trees
MBTC are quite important to evaluate the algorithm’s performance,
this paper collects their values for analysis. Performance
comparison and simulation results of these four algorithms
obtained in 2000 random trials for each case are shown in Table
3, Figs. 4 and 5.
Table 3 shows that MEQGA2 outperforms MEQGA1, CQGA and
CGA in each case of each topology since MEQGA2 always gets the
highest MSR and the lowest MBTC. The second best algorithm is
MEQGA1, and the worst one is CGA. For each algorithm, note that
for any topology, both MSR and MBTC of case2 are worse than that
of case1. For example, we make a comparison between T1-Case1
and T1-Case2. The MSR of CGA in T1-Case1 is 98.4% while that in
T1-Case2 is 95.6%. The MBTC of MEQGA2 in T1-Case1 is 194.0
while that in T1-Case2 is 249.0. And similar phenomena can be
found everywhere in Table 3. The reason is that for any topology
case2 has higher QoS level than case1 for case2 has severer QoS
requirements.
Each figure of Fig. 4 indicates the convergence characteristic of
the above algorithms in a certain case. All of the six sub-figures in
Fig. 4 can be divided into three groups: (a)–(d), (b)–(e), (c)–(f).
Figures belong to the same group are obtained by operating
algorithms on the same topology with the same multicast group
members but different QoS parameters which are given in Table
3. Fig. 4 illustrates that MEQGA2 distinguishes itself by the fastest
convergence speed and the most excellent capability on global
searching as well as robustness. This is because MEQGA2 adopts
not only ME based RAS determination scheme but also AQM oper-
ation. On the one hand, ME mechanism simplifies the RAS determi-
nation scheme by selecting RAS from a certain numerical range and
makes it more suitable to speed up the search efficiency of the
algorithm. On the other hand, AQM operation takes the individual
difference into full consideration so that it is easy to avoid the algo-
rithm from local optima. Without AQM operation, MEQGA1 does
not perform as well as MEQGA2 since the problem of local search
can not be figured out effectively. As employing SE mechanism,
CQGA is often inferior to MEQGA2 and MEQGA1 according to
Fig. 4, since those RAS values fit for this practical problem is usually
hard to determine. Since better characteristic of population diver-
sity is achieved by the three QGA algorithms, broader solution
space is explored and exploited simultaneously so that MEQGA2,
MEQGA1 and CQGA perform better than CGA. Fig. 5 shows the best
multicast trees achieved in the six cases.
6. Conclusion
An improved QGA has been proposed for QoS multicast routing
problem. By adopting ME mechanism, AQM operation and a repair
method for fitness evaluation, the performance of the proposed
393
algorithm is enhanced significantly. The simulation results clearly
demonstrate the superiority of this algorithm over CGA and CQGA
for solving QoS multicast routing problem in WDM networks.
Acknowledgements
This research was supported in part by the NSFC (No. 60572021,
90704006), National 973 Program (No. 2007CB310705), National
863 Program (No. 2007AA01Z247), PCSIRT (No. IRT0609), ISTCP
(No. 2006DFA11040), 111 Project (No. B07005), PR China.
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