Multiobjective multicast routing in wireless ad hoc networks - An Ant Colony approach

The transmission of real time multimedia services in wireless ad hoc networks requires optimal multicast routing protocol that satisfies the quality of service guarantees. However, multicast routing protocol in wireless ad hoc networks must also be energy aware since the nodes are energy constrained due to limited battery life. This gives rise to the need for efficient multicast routing protocol that is able to determine multicast routes which satisfies the quality of service guarantees and at the same time conserves energy. The design of such protocol can be formulated as a Multiobjective Multicast Routing Problem (MMRP) that attempts to optimize the objectives simultaneously. The paper proposes a novel multiobjective algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) for MMRP problem. Our protocol attempts to optimize the end-to-end delay and total transmitted power simultaneously to obtain the Pareto-optimal solutions. The simulation results are very promising and show that our algorithm is able to find near optimal solution efficiently.