HUB-GA: A heuristic for universal lists broadcasting using genetic algorithm

Broadcasting is a fundamental problem in the information dissemination area. In classical broadcasting, a message must be sent from one network member to all other members as rapidly as feasible. Although this problem is NP-hard for arbitrary graphs, it has several applications in various fields. As a result, the universal lists model, which replicates some real-world restrictions like the memory limits of nodes in large networks, is introduced as a branch of this problem in the literature. In the universal lists model, each node is equipped with a fixed list and has to follow the list regardless of the originator. As opposed to various applications for the problem of broadcasting with universal lists, the literature lacks any heuristic or approximation algorithm. In this regard, we suggest HUB-GA: A heuristic for universal lists broadcasting with genetic algorithm, as the first heuristic for this problem. HUB-GA works toward minimizing the universal lists broadcast time of a given graph with the aid of genetic algorithm. We undertake various numerical experiments on frequently used interconnection networks in the literature, graphs with clique-like structures, and synthetic instances with small-world model in order to cover many possibilities of industrial topologies. We also compare our results with state-of-the-art methods for classical broadcasting, which is proved to be the fastest model among all. Nevertheless of the substantial memory reduction in the universal list model compared to the classical model, our algorithm finds the same broadcast time as the classical model in diverse situations.