Ant-Based On-Demand Clustering Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

With the advancement of the mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), many researches were proposed to increase the efficiency of networks. The important factor affects the performance in MANET is discovering and maintaining paths since the node´s mobility causes topology change, which needs to be observed for effective communication. One of the popular studies for routing in the networks in recent years is the swarm intelligence which imitates the collective behavior of biological species to solve routing problems in the networks. Another efficient method is clustering scheme which can be auxiliary structure to cluster nodes in the network. In this paper, we use weakly connected dominating sets (WCDS) which clusters network by node´s maximum degree or minimum ID to propose an improved ant-based on-demand clustering routing (AOCR) protocol. AOCR uses ant-like agents inspired by the foraging behavior of ant colonies to explore networks and discover a route which fulfills several QoS requirements including minimal traffic overhead or energy-efficiency for MANET. Simulations on NS-2 show that our proposed scheme can effectively be applied in MANET to achieve a high packet delivery ratio, a low end-to-end delay with just a little increased energy.