Energy-Efficient Ant-Colony-Based Routing Algorithm for the MANETs

Abstract

Routing in MANET is a challenging problem as a result of highly dynamic topology as well as bandwidth and energy constraints. Many researchers have developed different routing protocols at network layer which have considered transmission power, residual battery capacity and self-organization while routing data packets to the destination. Swarm intelligence such as ants can find a shortest path when they work collectively as a group. The main focus of this work is to develop an energy-efficient swarm routing algorithm called Energy-efficient Ant-colony- based Routing Algorithm (EARA) for the MANETs. We have compared traditional Ad hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV) with EARA in terms of the node lifetime and throughput. The simulation results show that EARA has around 7% increase in average packet delivery ratio than AODV under different mobility speed indicating that it explores other optimal routes to improve the total efficiency.