Multicast routing is an effective way to communicate among multiple hosts in a network. It outperforms the basic broadcast strategy by sharing resources along general links, while sending information to a set of predefined multiple destinations concurrently. However, it is vulnerable to component failure in ad hoc network due to the lack of redundancy, multiple paths and multicast tree structure. Tree graph optimization problems (GOP) are usually difficult and time consuming NP-hard or NP-complete problems. Genetic algorithms (GA) have been proven to be an efficient technique for solving the GOP, in which well-designed chromosomes and appropriate operators are key factors that determine the performance of the GAs. Limited link, path constraints, and mobility of network hosts make the multicast routing protocol design particularly challenging in wireless ad hoc networks. Encoding trees is a critical scheme in GAs for solving these problems because each code should represent a tree. Prufer number is the most representative method of vertex encoding, which is a string of n-2 integers and can be transformed to an n-node tree. However, genetic algorithm based on Prufer encoding (GAP) does not preserve locality, while changing one element of its vector causes dramatically change in its corresponding tree topology.

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