Minimum energy multicast in static Wireless Ad Hoc Networks using swarm intelligence

Energy is a scarce resource in WANETs (Wireless Ad Hoc Networks) since the nodes are powered by non-renewable batteries. Traditional multicast routing protocols are not energy aware and thus do not take energy conservation into consideration. One approach for energy conservation is to send the messages of a communication session along the routes which minimizes the total sum of the transmitter powers. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is swarm intelligence based method widely used for network routing. The main objective of this paper is to minimize the energy in multicast routing using the ant colony approach. The experimental results are very promising and show that the proposed algorithm is capable of finding minimum energy routes for most of the problems considered which are comparable to the state-of-art algorithms.