An ant-swarm inspired energy-efficient ad hoc on-demand routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

As the world´s economic activities are expanding, the energy comes to the fore to the question of the sustainable growth in all technological areas, including wireless mobile networking. Energy-aware routing schemes for wireless networks have spurred a great deal of recent research towards achieving this goal. Recently, an energy-aware routing protocol for MANETs was proposed by us, in which the energy load among nodes is balanced so that a minimum energy level is maintained and the resulting network lifetime is increased. In this paper, an Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) inspired approach to EEAODR (so-called ACO-EEAODR) is proposed. To the best of our knowledge, no attempts have been made so far in this direction. The obtained simulation results show that the ACO-EEAODR outperforms the EEAODR scheme in terms of energy consumed and network lifetime performance metrics.