Ant-Based Stable Disjoint Path Routing Algorithm in MANETs

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. 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 Disjoint Path Routing Algorithm (ABSDPRA) is proposed. ABSDPRA is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. The proposed algorithm can consider link stability. The introduced routing algorithm is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. ABSDPRA exploits the concept of a routing protocol called GRID and discover multiple disjoint routing paths with a low routing overhead. Simulation results indicate that ABSDPRA has a higher packet delivery ratio, lower end-to-end delay and lower routing load than AODV.