GAMAN: A GA Based QoS Routing Method for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Abstract

The Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are useful in many applications environments and do not need any infrastructure support. Much work has been done on routing in MANETs. However, the proposed routing solutions only deal with the best effort data traffic. Connections with Quality of Service (QoS) requirements, such as voice channels with delay and bandwidth constraints, are not supported. The QoS routing has been receiving increasingly intensive attention in the wireline network domain. However, these QoS routing algorithms can not be applied directly to MANETs, because of the bandwidth constraints and dynamic network topology of MANETs. Searching for the shortest path with minimal cost and finding delay constrained least-cost paths are NP-complete problems. For this reason, approximated solutions and heuristic algorithms should be developed for multi-path constraints QoS routing. Also, to cope with changing of MANET topology, routing methods should be adaptive, flexible, and intelligent. In this paper, we propose a Genetic Algorithm (GA) based routing method for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (GAMAN). Robustness rather than optimality is the primary concern of GAMAN. The GAMAN uses two QoS parameters for routing. The performance evaluation via simulations shows that GAMAN is a promising QoS routing algorithm for MANETs.