Abstract
QoS guarantee is crucial for delivering real-time multimedia over any type of network. This paper proposes QoS-aware multimedia service selection in a heterogeneous network environment. The QoS-aware service selection is based on the nature-inspired routing algorithm, AntNet. The performance evaluation for this selection algorithm is conducted on the multimedia content transcoding system. This paper presents and evaluates a real implementation of an ant-inspired selection algorithm in the university network environment for choosing multimedia transcoding services. From the test results, it is observed that an ant-inspired service selection algorithm outperforms the traditional shortest-path selection algorithm in terms of transcoding delay. In addition, we also compare the proposed algorithm with other algorithms through simulation, measure the performance, and find that the proposed algorithm achieves better QoS assurance.