An efficient genetic algorithm for anycast routing in delay/disruption tolerant networks

Delay/Disruption tolerant networks (DTNs) have the capacity to interconnect devices and areas that are underserved by traditional networks. Anycast routing can be used for many applications in DTNs, and is useful when nodes wish to send messages to at least one, and preferably only one, of the members in a destination group. In this letter, an anycast routing algorithm for DTNs based on genetic algorithms (GAs) is presented. The GA is applied to find the appropriate path combination to comply with the delivery needs of a group of anycast sessions simultaneously. The proposed GA-based solution uses the concept of subpopulation to produce the next generation population, a limited number of solutions to be evaluated, and yields minimum delay to achieve a specified rate of delivery. Via simulations we show that this scheme can produce good results.