Elsevier

Applied Soft Computing

Volume 40, March 2016, Pages 517-525
Applied Soft Computing

A multi-objective evolutionary algorithm based QoS routing in wireless mesh networks

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asoc.2015.12.007Get rights and content

Highlights

  • The present work proposes a Modified Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II which is applied to the routing problem in WMN.

  • Dynamic crowding distance strategy aims to improve the diversity of the non-dominated solution.

  • Analytic hierarchy process is used to find the best compromise solution.

  • Compared to NSGA-II, the proposed algorithm can improve the throughput and minimizes the transmission delay.

Abstract

The huge demand for real time services in wireless mesh networks (WMN) creates many challenging issues for providing quality of service (QoS). Designing of QoS routing protocols, which optimize the multiple objectives is computationally intractable. This paper proposes a new model for routing in WMN by using Modified Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (MNSGA-II). The objectives which are considered here are the minimization of expected transmission count and the transmission delay. In order to retain the diversity in the non-dominated solutions, dynamic crowding distance (DCD) procedure is implemented in NSGA-II. The simulation is carried out in Network Simulator 2 (NS-2) and comparison is made using the metrics, expected transmission count and transmission delay by varying node mobility and by increasing number of nodes. It is observed that MNSGA-II improves the throughput and minimizes the transmission delay for varying number of nodes and higher mobility scenarios. The simulation clearly shows that MNSGA-II algorithm is certainly more suitable for solving multiobjective routing problem. A decision-making procedure based on analytic hierarchy process (AHP) has been adopted to find the best compromise solution from the set of Pareto-solutions obtained through MNSGA-II. The performance of MNSGA-II is compared with reference point based NSGA-II (R-NSGA-II) in terms of spread.

Introduction

Wireless mesh networks (WMN) have received due recognition because of their extended coverage, robustness, self healing, self configuring, easy maintenance and low cost broadband network services. WMN offers an attractive platform to a large variety of applications such as broadband home networking, building automation, public safety and emergency response communications, community networks and transportation systems. WMNs [1] are composed of static mesh routers and mobile mesh clients. Mesh routers provide connectivity between mesh clients which form the backbone infrastructure of WMN. The gateway functionality in mesh network enable the integration of WMN with other existing networks.

Multi-constrained QoS routing in WMN identifies feasible route in the network satisfying the multiple constraints. The constraints are usually imposed by quality of service (QoS) requirements such as minimum guaranteed bandwidth, a bounded end-to-end delay, packet loss and a limited interference among the wireless links. Many applications, such as audio, video conferencing and collaborative environments have multiple QoS requirements such as bandwidth, delay, packet loss, hop count, reliability, energy, etc. Multi-constrained routing problem cannot be solved in polynomial time because it is an NP-complete problem.

This work presents a multiobjective evolutionary algorithm approach for determining QoS routing in WMN. Multiobjective optimization problems having conflicting objective functions gives rise to a set of optimal solutions, instead of one optimal solution. No solution can be considered to be better than any other with respect to all objectives. These optimal solutions are known as Pareto-optimal solutions. The curve or surface describes the optimal trade-off solutions between objectives is known as the Pareto front. One of the major goals in multiobjective optimization is to find a set of well distributed optimal solutions along the Pareto front. Maintaining the diversity of the population not only requires a certain space distance between individuals, but also needs good uniformity for the non-dominated sets. There are several contemporary multiobjective evolutionary algorithms [2], [3], [4], [5], [6] which are aimed to find the Pareto-optimal front while achieving diversity in the obtained Pareto-optimal front. The major advantage of these multiobjective evolutionary algorithms (MOEAs) is that they produce a set of Pareto-optimal solutions in a single run. From this, the final solution is found by applying decision analysis technique. Analytic hierarchy process (AHP) is used for finding the best optimal solution from the set of Pareto-optimal solution. This paper focuses on the minimization of expected transmission count and transmission delay simultaneously by using MNSGA-II and AHP.

The remainder of the paper is organized as follows. Section 2 discusses the related work about the single objective and multiobjective evolutionary algorithms used in WMN and other networks. The mathematical problem formulation in multiobjective context is presented in Section 3. A meta-heuristic algorithm based on MNSGA-II to solve the multiobjective routing problem is proposed in Section 4. Section 5 present the simulation results to validate our algorithm. Finally, in Section 6 we summarize the conclusion of this article and discuss the possible lines of future work.

Section snippets

Single objective optimization in WMN

Several routing protocols are used in WMN but most of the protocols consider only one objective either throughput or delay or hop count or packet loss or energy. Sun et al. [10] proposed on demand code aware routing scheme (OCAR) for WMN. This scheme detects a route with more network coding opportunities along the entire route rather than the two-hop regions. By using Coding Aware and Interference avoid routing metric (RCAIA), OCAR handle both intra and inter flow interferences. RCAIA of link l

Problem formulation

Wireless mesh network can be represented as an undirected graph G = (V, E) where V is the set of nodes consisting of both mesh client and mesh routers and E is the set of edges representing wireless links between the nodes. A path from node Vi to node Vj is the sequence of nodes from V in which no node appears more than once. The routing problem is to determine a path between the source and destination nodes with minimum transmission delay and minimum expected transmission count.

Multiobjective evolutionary algorithm for routing problem

Multiobjective optimization can be solved by several methods, we have chosen MOEA because it has the ability to find multiple optimal solutions in one single simulation run [4]. NSGA-II is one of the most efficient and popular multiobjective evolutionary algorithm. In this paper, we propose MNSGA-II, an improved version of NSGA-II for solving the multiobjective routing problem. MNSGA-II algorithm uses non-dominated sorting for fitness assignments and dynamic crowding distance for improving the

Performance evaluation

To analyze the performance of MNSGA-II algorithm we consider the Optimized link state routing protocol (OLSR). In OLSR, the Multi-Point Relays (MPR) play a very crucial role in forwarding the packets. The node which chooses its MPR will forward the packets and reduce the redundant transmissions. The Fedora OS is used to run the simulation software NS2 (Network Simulator 2) version 2.34 for the evaluation. The patch for NS-2.34 to simulate the OLSR is given by Ross [35]. Simulation and

Conclusion

In this paper, Modified Non-dominated Sorting Genetic Algorithm-II (MNSGA-II) is proposed for routing in wireless mesh network. While considering the presence of links or connectivity between nodes, network-related status of links like transmission delay and expected transmission count in links are collected and measured. These measures offer an indication of how much a link is appropriate while deciding about paths for providing QoS routing. By using this algorithm, we are able to obtain

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