Topology Control for Wireless Ad hoc Networks: A Genetic Algorithm-based Approach

In an ad hoc wireless network, the topology control problem is to minimize the transmission power, or selecting the least number of neighbors, while preserving the network connectivity. Recently, there have been increasing interests in applying biologically inspired approaches, such as swarm intelligence and simulated annealing, to this NP-complete global optimization problem. In this paper, we propose schemes of applying genetic algorithm to this problem. Simulation results demonstrate the effectiveness of our approach.