A Genetic Algorithm for the Bandwidth Calculation Problem in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Most of the existing routing protocols are designed primarily to carry best-effort traffic and only concerned with shortest-path routing. Little attention is paid to the issues related to the quality-of-service (QoS) requirement of a route. In this paper, we will consider the problem of searching for a route satisfying the bandwidth requirement in a mobile ad-hoc network. Unlike in a wired network, where the available bandwidth of a route is simply the minimum bandwidth of the links along the route, the calculation of the available bandwidth of a route in a mobile ad hoc network has been proved to be NP-complete. The Genetic Algorithm (GA) has successfully been applied to many famous NP-complete problems in communication networks, such as the multicast routing problem. Recently, many researchers have attempted to adopt genetic algorithms to solve various problems existing in mobile ad hoc networks. In this paper, we will use the principle of genetic algorithms to design a novel heuristic algorithm, which executed in a centralized manner, for the bandwidth calculation problem in the CDMA-over-TDMA channel model. Extensive computer simulations are performed to compare the performance of our proposed GA method and that of other existing heuristic algorithms . Simulation results verify that our GA can produce larger bandwidth than others.