Swarm intelligence for routing in mobile ad hoc networks

Mobile ad hoc networks are communication networks built up of a collection of mobile devices, which can communicate through wireless connections. Routing is the task of directing data packets from a source node to a given destination. This task is particularly hard in mobile ad hoc networks: due to the mobility of the network elements and the lack of central control, routing algorithms should be robust, adaptive, and work in a decentralized and self-organizing way. In this paper, we describe an algorithm, which draws inspiration from swarm intelligence to obtain these characteristics. More specifically, we borrow ideas from ant colonies and from the ant colony optimization framework. In an extensive set of simulation tests, we compare our routing algorithm with a state-of-the-art algorithm, and show that it gets better performance over a wide range of different scenarios and for a number of different evaluation measures. In particular, we show that it scales better with the number of nodes in the network.