On Minimizing Network Coding Resource: A Modified Particle Swarm Optimization Approach

This paper studies the problem of how to efficiently minimize network coding resource. A modified particle swarm optimization (PSO) algorithm is proposed to tackle the problem, with the concept of path-relinking (PR) integrated into the evolutionary framework. As an efficient local search heuristic that makes use of problem-specific domain knowledge, PR helps strike a better balance between global exploration and local exploitation for the evolutionary search. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm overweighs a number of existing and commonly used evolutionary algorithms (EAs) in terms of the solution quality, convergence, and computational time.