Quality-of-service-enabled ant colony-based multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are dynamically changing and self-configuring networks. Owing to their widespread use for many applications, multipath routing in MANETs has been widely discussed for providing fault-tolerance routing, quality-of-service (QoS) and various other purposes. The authors propose a quality of service enabled ant colony-based multipath routing (QAMR) algorithm based on the foraging behaviour of ant colony for selecting path and transmitting data. In this approach, the path is selected based on the stability of the nodes and the path preference probability. The authors have considered bandwidth, delay and hop count as the QoS parameters along with the stability of node, number of hops and path preference probability factors. Simulations performed with network simulator 2 shows that the proposed algorithm is scalable and performs better at higher traffic load compared to the existing algorithms.