QM2RP: A QoS-Based Mobile Multicast Routing Protocol Using Multi-Objective Genetic Algorithm

With the increasing demand for real-time services in next generation wireless networks, quality-of-service (QoS) based routing offers significant challenges. Multimedia applications, such as video conferencing or real-time streaming of stock quotes, require strict QoS guarantee on bandwidth and delay parameters while communicating among multiple hosts. These applications give rise to the need for efficient multicast routing protocols, which will be able to determine multicast routes that satisfy different QoS constraints simultaneously. However, designing such protocols for optimizing multiple objectives, is computationally intractable. Precisely, discovering optimal multicast routes is an NP-hard problem when the network state information is inaccurate – a common scenario in wireless networks. Based on the multi-objective genetic algorithm (MOGA), in this paper we propose a QoS-based mobile multicast routing protocol (QM2RP) that determines near-optimal routes on demand. Our protocol attempts to optimize multiple QoS parameters, namely end-to-end delay, bandwidth requirements, and residual bandwidth utilization. Furthermore, it is fast and efficient in tackling dynamic multicast group membership information arising due to user mobility in wireless cellular networks. Simulation results demonstrate that the proposed protocol is capable of discovering a set of QoS-based, near-optimal multicast routes within a few iterations, even with imprecise network information. Among these routes one can choose the best possible one depending on the specified QoS requirements. The protocol is also scalable and yields lower multicast call-blocking rates for dynamic multicast group size in large networks.