A New Routing Protocol in MANET using Cuckoo Optimization Algorithm

Background and Objectives: With the recent progressions in wireless communication technology, powerful and costless wireless receivers are used in a variety of mobile applications. Mobile networks are a self-arranged network, which is including of mobile nodes that communicate with each other without a central control Mobile networks gained considerable attention due to the adaptability, scalability, and costs reduction. Routing and power consumption is a major problem in mobile networks because the network topology changes frequently. Mobile wireless networks suffer from high error rates, power constraints, and limited bandwidth. Due to the high importance of routing protocols in dynamic multi-hop networks, many researchers have paid attention to the routing problem in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET). This paper proposes a new routing algorithm in MANETs which is based upon the Cuckoo optimization algorithm (COA). Methods: COA is inspired by the lifestyle of a family of birds called cuckoo. These birds’ lifestyle, egg-laying features, and breeding are the basis of the development of this optimization algorithm. COA is started by an initial population. There are two types of population of cuckoos in different societies: mature cuckoos and eggs. This algorithm tries to find more stable links for routing. Results: Simulation results prove the high performance of proposed work in terms of throughput, delay, hop count, and discovery time. Conclusion: The cuckoo search convergence is based on the establishment of the Markov chain model to prove that it satisfies the two conditions of the global convergence in a random search algorithm. Also, the cuckoo search that suitable for solving continuous problems and multi-objective problems. We have done a lot of experiments to verify the performance of the Cuckoo algorithm for routing in MANETs. The result of experiments shows the superiority of the proposed method against a well-known AODV algorithm.