Innovative Method of the Evaluation of Multicriterial Multicast Routing Algorithms

Abstract

Theoretical considerations of the multicast Quality of Service (QoS) routing have been a rapidly developing and dynamic research area for years. Several algorithms derived from different approaches have been proposed, while the pool of valid solutions to the problem is steadily growing. When new solutions are compared with their predecessors, as much information as possible about their characteristics and differences is needed. Both the graph theory and the optimization theory provide robust and objective means of comparing not only algorithms, but also the results they produce. However, any possible extension to the comparison methods is vital and can bring interesting new information that would eventually lead to innovative conclusions. This article presents a method, derived from practice and experience, that simulates the drainage of resources accumulated by consecutive communication allocations. The nature of this comparison is an extension to the classical measurement of the success ratio and this creates a context of the continuous measure of a success rather than a simple binary value. In this article such a method with regard to algorithms optimizing multicast problems for more than two criteria is used for the first time and leads to an interesting conclusion about the influence of the number of the criteria on the result.