Genetic based approach for optimized routing in Maritime Tactical MANETs

Ad-Hoc Networks are wireless, infrastructure less, multi hop, and dynamic networks established by a collection of mobile nodes and are commonly termed as Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs). Maritime Tactical Networks (MTN), requiring high performance and security, are one of the main application areas of MANETs. Military community is redefining the way wars will be fought in open sees, progressing towards a Network-Centric Warfare (NCW) paradigm. MANETs are considered the vision of NCW, which requires thorough understanding and research for its application in the maritime environment. MTN are composed of mobile nodes (ships, submarine, aircraft etc.) and static nodes (shore stations), which can only be connected with each other through radio using the electromagnetic spectrum. The nodes operate both as hosts and routers. Due to mobility of nodes, the topology of the network may change rapidly and unexpectedly, thus setting up routes that meet high reliability is very challenging issue. Hence it is very important to find a route that can obtain highly stable routing during data transmission to undertake combined operations without interference. Moreover, nodes may not take same path because they are not stationary and have limited resources. Routing in such environment is a challenging task with the intention of utilizing minimum resources of the node and increasing the efficiency. An intelligent route optimization techniques based on Genetic Algorithm (GA) is used to address the problem for MTN. This paper gives a multidimensional view of the challenges in MTN and proposes GA based approach for routing in MTN keeping in consideration shore-to-ship and ship-to-ship communications at any sea area.