Ant Colony Optimization and Ad-hoc On-demand Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV) Based Routing Protocol

Path quality of service is one of the key factors affecting routing performance in ad hoc networks. In order to improve multipath routing performance, we present an ant colony optimization and ad-hoc on-demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) based routing protocol (ACO-AOMDV) for ad hoc networks. In ACO-AOMDV, ant packets deposit simulated pheromone as a function of multiple parameters corresponding to the information collected each path visited, such as average link count of path, average load of path, hop count and the current pheromone the nodes possess and so on, and provide the information to the visiting nodes to update their pheromone tables by endowing the above different parameters corresponding to different information with different weight values. Selecting the transmission path dynamically through regular updating the pheromone of transmission path and backup paths, expects to improve routing performance. Simulation results show that ACO-AOMDV performs effectively in terms of packet delivery fraction, end-to-end delay and route discovery frequency compared with ARA and AOMDV.