In network coding, each intermediate node in the network is allowed, if necessary, to recombine data packets received from different incoming links. By doing so, a maximized multicast throughput can always be achieved.
Due to the necessary coding operations, network coding incurs additional cost such as computational overhead or transmission delay. It is thus important that the amount of coding operations is minimized while the benefits of network coding are warranted. However, such problem is NP-hard.
Multimedia applications such as video/audio conferencing and distance education demand multicast communications, where data streams are sent from the source node to a set of destinations within the same multicast group in computer networks. The objective is to maximize the multicast throughput within limited and constrained resources. The quality of service (QoS) requirements in the underlying computer network take into account several attributes such as cost, delay, delay variation, packet losses and hop count.
This page includes resources from the research at School of Computer Science, University of Nottingham addressing the Multicast Network Routing using evolutionary algorithms.
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