An efficient multicast routing in MANETs: A genetic algorithm approach

The characteristics of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET) demands new set of network strategies in order to provide reliable group communication. Group communication is an essential requirement for MANET since nodes forming these temporary networks generally come together for common purposes and they need to collaborate. Multicast routing protocols plays a significant role in MANET to provide this communication. Multicast transmission allows the operator to drastically save network resources, it also makes the routing of the traffic flows more complex than in unicast transmissions. A huge amount of possible tress have to be considered and analyzed to and the appropriate routing paths. To address this problem, we propose the use of the genetic algorithms, which considerably reduce the number of solutions to be evaluated. Then we select a single path from the set of paths between each node-pair. The routes are computed using the on-demand source routing principle considering the reliability of the nodes. Simulations were conducted on the computed routes to evaluate the performance of the proposed algorithm.