Natural selection of message forwarding algorithms in Multihop wireless networks

The need for self-managing multihop MANETs (mobile ad hoc networks) arose recently, where the network rapidly adapts to the changes of the environment without any central control. One of the challenges is how to spread the information fast and resource-effectively in the network. This paper presents a novel adaptive framework, which utilizes natural selection for choosing the adequate message forwarding algorithms for changing environments. The survival of the competing algorithms depends on their efficiency, while the fitness evaluation is made locally without overhead generating performance feedback. Performance evaluations were carried out in our simulation platform tailored to a self-managing MANET environment, to analyze the performance measures of different message forwarding algorithms.