Ant-based Energy Aware Disjoint Multipath 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. This leads to increase in both delay and control overhead as well as decrease in packet delivery ratio. To alleviate these problems, a new routing algorithm called ant-based energy aware disjoint multipath routing algorithm (AEADMRA) is proposed. AEADMRA is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. AEADMRA extends GRID to enable path accumulation in route request/reply packets and discover multiple energy aware routing paths with a low routing overhead. Simulation results indicate that performance of AEADMRA is much better than that of GRID.