A genetic algorithm for multicast routing under delay constraint in WDM network with different light splitting

Because optical WDM networks will become a realistic choice for buildings back-bones, multicasting in the WDM network should be supported for various network ap-plications. In this paper, a new multicast problem, Multicast Routing under Delay Con-straint Problem (MRDCP), routing a request with delay bound to all destinations in a WDM network with different light splitting is solved by genetic algorithms (GAs), where different light splitting means that nodes in the network can transmit one copy or multi-ple copies to other nodes by using the same wavelength. The MRDCP can be reduced to the Minimal Steiner Tree Problem (MSTP) which has been shown to be NP-Complete. We propose a destination-oriented representation to represent chromosomes, three gen-eral genetic operators (selection, crossover, and mutation), four types of operators (Chromosome Crossover, Individual Crossover, Chromosome Mutation, and Individual Mutation). Four mutation heuristics (Random Mutation (RM), Cost First Mutatio