A hybrid algorithm for the point to multipoint routing problem

The process of nding optimal routing for a set of circuit connection requests through a communications network is known as call request scheduling or message scheduling Each request has a single source and multiple destinations and dif ferent requests may have di erent source and di erent des tination nodes Finding optimal routing for a set of requests is called the Point to Multipoint Routing Problem PMRP Current practice takes each point to multipoint request and treats it as a collection of point to point requests which is very costly This paper presents an algorithm for the Point to Multipoint Routing Problem that uses a genetic algo rithm and a heuristic Steiner tree algorithm Our hybrid algorithm allows the scheduler to nd an optimal or near optimal path through the network for each request In our algorithm each request is treated as a whole and not as a col lection of point to point requests We ran our hybrid PMRP algorithm on several test cases with excellent results