A genetic algorithm for energy-efficient based multicast routing on MANETs

In ad hoc networks, mobile node battery energy is finite and represents one of the greatest constraints for designing multicast routing protocols. In regards to the battery lifetime limitation in supporting multicast routing, some studies have investigated a power saving network layer. These proposed methods have always considered several techniques such as a route load for relaying, battery lifetime in route selection, decreasing the frequency of sending control messages, optimizing the size of control headers, and efficient route re-configuration techniques. This paper discusses the multicast routing problem with multiple QoS constraints in MANETs. It is also an NP-Complete problem that deals with the various constraints. We propose an energy-efficient genetic algorithm mechanism to resolve these problems. Furthermore, we design a source-tree-based routing algorithm and build the shortest-path multicast tree to minimize delay time by using a small population size in the genetic algorithm. Only a few nodes are involved in the route computation. We also improve the genetic sequence and topology encoding and prolong the lifetime of mobile nodes that calculate the residual battery energy of all nodes in a multicast tree. The simulation results show that our proposal method is an efficient and robust algorithm for multicast route selection.