Mobility-aware Ant Colony Optimization routing for vehicular ad hoc networks

Vehicular Ad hoc Networks (VANETs) are a special type of Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), made by vehicles communicating among themselves, and by vehicles communicating to devices located in the margins of roads and highways. The main characteristic of a VANET is the high speed of network nodes - that can go up to 200 km/h -, and that impacts directly on the ability the network has to deliver data, given we might have a network formed for just a small amount of time. It has been shown in several works that ant-based routing can be successfully applied to both wired and wireless networks. This work proposes Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) procedures that take advantage of information available in vehicular networks - such as the vehicles´ position and speed -, in order to design an ant-based algorithm that performs well in the dynamics of such networks. The authors have also adapted the Dynamic MANET On-demand (DYMO) routing protocol to make use of the ACO procedures proposed in this paper, and the resulting bio-inspired protocol, MAR-DYMO, had its performance evaluated in an urban scenario and compared against a few other routing protocols. The obtained results suggest that making use of environmental information can make ACO algorithms more suitable for routing in vehicular ad hoc networks.