An Improved Routing Algorithm Based on Energy Efficient Ant Colony

Abstract

For the problem that the existing multi-path routing protocol in the MANETs can’t offer high-quality services with increasing the number of nodes and speed, an improved algorithm is proposed based on Energy-Efficient Ant-Based Routing Algorithm (EEABR) through Ant-Colony algorithm (ACA) in this paper. The improved algorithm makes improvement on packet structure and the way of updating pheromone. In order to save the energy consumption caused by the field redundancy in EEABR, based on the different tasks of the forward ant and the backward ant, the algorithm proposed in this paper designs two kinds of reasonable packet structures. The pheromone updating is added to the tasks of the forward ant in this algorithm to speed up the convergence rate.The path length is considered when pheromone updating is executed by the backward ant, the ants release more pheromones on the node which is closer to the destination, which makes the destination node is more likely to be found and speeds up the convergence rate. The improved algorithm shows higher superiority on energy consumption and prolonging the network lifetime than EEABR.