A Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm for Reorganizing Network Communications

The Distributed Evolutionary Algorithm (DEA) presented in this paper produces efficient TDMA schedules for communication in an environment of changing network topology by passing topological and traffic information among nodes communicating on the schedule. As information is gained in this way more nodes are added to the communicating group until the entire network is communicating on a common schedule. The key feature of the DEA presented is that the reorganization phase is fast, requiring a number of TDMA slots only on the order of the number of nodes. A secondary feature is that some network communication can take place, and thus some of the traffic requirements can be satisfied, even while the network is being reorganized. Numerical results are presented for a number of randomly generated networks which show how the algorithm performs.