An Evolutionary Approach to Multi-point Relays Selection in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Multi-point relaying is a technique to carry out the flooding of broadcast messages in the mobile ad hoc network (MANET) in a highly efficient manner. In this technique, each node v chooses a subset S of nodes among its one-hop neighbors, and only the nodes belonging to S are allowed to re-transmit the broadcast messages received from v. The nodes in S are called multi-point relays. By limiting the privilege to re-transmit the broadcast messages received from v to only multi-point relays allows for significant reduction in redundant broadcast messages. In this paper, we have proposed a steady-state genetic algorithm based approach for the selection of multi-point relays. Unlike the previously proposed approaches, which use bit-vector encoding to represent a solution, we have used the integer encoding where the multi-point relay nodes are represented as an ordered list. For dense networks, where the number of nodes in multi-point relays is only a small fraction of one-hop neighbors, a significant savings is achieved not only in memory usage, but also in computation time as the efficiency of genetic operators depends on the length of the chromosome. Computational results show the effectiveness of our approach.