The Shortest-Path Broadcast Problem

Many applications of the communication require a source node to send information to all nodes through a communication network. To support these applications, it is necessary to determine a shortest paths tree of minimal cost to connect the source node to all nodes subject to bandwidth constraint and hop limit on information communication. A genetic algorithm is suitable to solve the presented problem. Therefore, the paper presents a genetic algorithm to solve the minimal cost shortest paths tree problem subject to bandwidth constrained and hop limited. The objective of the proposed algorithm is to search the optimal set of edges connecting all nodes such that the costs is minimized, the bandwidth is constrained and hop is limited. Some examples are provided to illustrate the effectiveness of this algorithm.