Ant colony optimization for multicasting in static wireless ad-hoc networks

Nodes of wireless ad-hoc networks are generally equipped with batteries. This makes energy a scarce resource. Therefore, power consumption of network operations is critical and subject to optimization. One of the fundamental problems in ad-hoc networks is multicasting. In this work, we consider the so-called minimum energy multicast (MEM) problem in static ad-hoc networks. This problem can be stated as a combinatorial optimization problem. We develop an ant colony optimization algorithm for networks with omni-directional as well as directional antennas. The results show that our algorithm consistently outperforms existing techniques. This work was supported by grant TIN2007-66523 (FORMALISM) of the Spanish Government, and by the EU project FRONTS (FP7-ICT-2007-1) funded by the European Commission under the FET Proactive Initiative Pervasive Adaptation. In addition, Christian Blum acknowledges support from the Ramón y Cajal program of the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation, and Hugo Hernández acknowledges support from the Catalan Government through an FI grant.