Towards Better Traffic Localization of Virtual LANs Using Genetic Algorithm
Abdul Hameed, Adnan Noor Mian · The Computer Journal · 2015
Virtual Local Area Networks (VLANs) provide logical grouping in LANs that are used for many purposes including to limit broadcast traffic and to provide better traffic localization. For better traffic localization and broadcast containment, VLANs could perform well only when the VLAN memberships for nodes are optimized. We propose a Genetic Algorithm-based solution to help the network administrator in identifying node groupings in the LAN prior to VLANs implementation. Identification of such groups allows a network administrator to decide a VLAN topology that provides maximum traffic localization and broadcast containment.We select a fitness function and compare three selection mechanisms namely roulette wheel, ranking and tournament selection for different number of nodes, VLANs, crossover and mutation probabilities. Our experiments show that the ranking selection with a crossover probability of 0.3 and mutation probability of 0.05 produces good result. Moreover, we also show that the proposed GA-based approach is most efficient in comparison with other four heuristics being used to solve the same problem.