Exact and heuristic algorithms for multi-constrained path selection problem

The multi-constrained path (MCP) selection problem occurs when the quality of services (QoS) are supported for point-to-point connections in the distributed multimedia applications deployed on the Internet. This NP-complete problem is concerned how to determine a feasible path between two end-points, so that a set of QoS path constraints can be satisfied simultaneously. Based on the branch-and-bound technology and tabu-searching strategy, an optimal algorithm and a heuristic algorithm are proposed in this paper. The experimental results show that our heuristic algorithm not only has very good performance on several different network topologies, but also is very efficient method for solving large-scale MCP problem.