Genetic Algorithms for Dynamic Routing Problems in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Routing plays an important role in various types of networks. There are two main ways to route the packets, i.e., unicast and multicast. In most cases, the unicast routing problem is to find the shortest path between two nodes in the network and the multicast routing problem is to find an optimal tree spanning the source and all the destinations. In recent years, both the shortest path routing and the multicast routing have been well addressed using intelligent optimization techniques. With the advancement in wireless communications, more and more mobile wireless networks appear, e.g., mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). One of the most important characteristics in MANETs is the topology dynamics, that is, the network topology changes over time due to energy conservation or node mobility. Therefore, both routing problems turn out to be dynamic optimization problems in MANETs. In this chapter, we investigate a series of dynamic genetic algorithms to solve both the dynamic shortest path routing problem and the dynamic multicast routing problem in MANETs. The experimental results show that these specifically designed dynamic genetic algorithms can quickly adapt to environmental changes (i.e., the network topology changes) and produce high quality solutions after each change.