Optimization of Multi-Hop Wireless Routing with Grey Wolf Optimizer
Najem N. Sirhan, Manel Martínez‐Ramón · 2025
In modern wireless networks, multi-hop routing has emerged as a critical mechanism to extend coverage and increase the network's flexibility. Optimizing the routing process—deciding how data flows from a source node to a destination node—is a challenging task due to constrained link capacities, node interconnectivity, and dynamic network topologies. This paper presents a novel approach for optimizing multi-hop wireless routing using the Grey Wolf Optimizer (GWO). GWO is adapted to optimize flow-conservation and capacity constraints through a penalty-based mechanism, ensuring only feasible flows are rewarded. Results show that GWO identifies strong routing solutions and converges reliably to near-optimal flows, as evidenced by flow distributions across repeated trials. These findings affirm that nature-inspired algorithms such as GWO can effectively cope with the complexity and variability inherent in multi-hop wireless networks, delivering high-quality routing solutions that balance exploration of the search space with exploitation of promising configurations.