Fast determination of QoS-based multicast routes in wireless networks using genetic algorithm

In this paper, we propose a novel multicast route discovery scheme for wireless networks, satisfying quality of service (QoS) constraints such as bandwidth requirement and end-to-end delay guarantees. The underlying approach is based on a genetic algorithm (GA). The problem of (optimal) multicast route discovery is NP-hard when the network state information is inaccurate, which is so common in the wireless domain. In general, this makes it difficult to determine multicast routes on demand, and hence the network resources are never used to their full potential. The proposed GA based method, however, is shown to discover multicast routes for large networks within few iterations, even with imprecise network information, and thus it ran be used for an on-demand basis. We observed an approximate linear relationship between the computation time and the number of nodes in a network. In addition we have studied the effects of choosing the fitness function of the GA.