Ant-Based Stable Multipath Routing Algorithm in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is one consisting of a set of mobile hosts capable of communicating with each other without the assistance of base stations. Earlier research has proposed several unipath routing protocols specifically on MANET, but most studies have not focused on the limitations of battery resource. However, the single path is easily broken and needs to perform a route discovery process again due to the dynamic topology of ad hoc networks. To alleviate these problems, a new routing algorithm called ant-based stable multipath routing algorithm (ABSMRA) is proposed. ABSMRA is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. The proposed algorithm can consider link stability and provide the most stable path to route according to probability. The introduced routing algorithm is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. Simulation results indicate that ABSMRA has a higher packet delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay and lower routing load than AODV.