Fuzzy Ant Colony Based Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Routing is a challenging task in mobile adhoc network due to nodal mobility, unstable links and limited resources. Swarm intelligence, as demonstrated by biological swarm, such as ant colony has found to be a attractive technique for routing in MANET. However existing swarm intelligence based routing protocols find an optimal path by considering only one or two route selection metrics, such as hop count or time delay making them unsuitable for routing multimedia traffic or real time applications which require optimization of several QOS parameters. Also they donpsilat consider correlations among multiple route selection parameters. This paper proposes a novel approach called fuzzy ant colony based routing protocol (FACO) using fuzzy logic and swarm intelligence to select optimal path by considering optimization of multiple objectives while retaining the advantages of swarm based intelligence algorithm. Simulation results show that the proposed protocol is superior over existing swarm intelligence based routing protocols for routing in MANET.