An efficient multi-objective QoS-routing algorithm for wireless multicasting

The increasing demand of real-time wireless communication has led to the development of quality-of-service (QoS) based routing. Most of the wireless multimedia applications require strict QoS guarantee (e.g. delay, bandwidth) during the communication between a single source and multiple destinations. This gives rise to the need for an efficient multicast QoS-routing strategy. Determination of such QoS-based optimal multicast routes boils down to a multi-objective optimization problem, which is computationally intractable in polynomial time. We propose a new multicast tree selection algorithm based on non-dominated sorting technique of the genetic algorithm to simultaneously optimize multiple QoS parameters. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed algorithm is capable of discovering a set of QoS-based near optimal, non-dominated multicast routes within a few iterations. From this set the user can choose desirably favorite solution depending on specific QoS requirements. The scalability and the performance of the algorithm with increasing number of network nodes is also presented.