Energy efficient QoS provisioning: A multi-colony ant algorithm approach

With the advancement of technology, there is a growing desire to provide support for real time multimedia services over wireless ad hoc networks. These applications demand strict Quality-of-Service (QoS) guarantees by the underlying network in terms of delay, delay variance and packet loss. However, limited battery life of the nodes in a wireless network poses significant challenges in finding QoS optimized multicast routes. The depletion of energy resources of the node may lead to a disjoint network that can severely affect the QoS requirement of the application. In this paper, we investigate the problem of building a multicast tree that aims energy conservation while meeting the QoS demands of the application. We formulate the issue as a multiobjective optimization problem and apply a multi-colony ant approach to find the Pareto front for the new problem. The experimental results are presented to demonstrate the effectiveness of the algorithm. The results are compared with Elitist Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm (NSGA-II).