Ant Colony Optimization based multicast routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks

Multicasting in Mobile Ad hoc wireless Networks (MANETs) is a big challenge and a significant issue. Due to limited bandwidth and dynamic nature of ad hoc wireless networks, it is required that a multicast routing protocol should be efficient and effective. Existing tree-based and mesh-based multicast routing protocols are not suitable under multiple constraints. Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is swarm intelligence based method widely used for multicast routing in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs). Based on it, we therefore proposed a Multicast Routing Algorithm (MRA) which is called ACOBMRA for MANETs. Moreover, we analyzed various multicast routing protocols, and identified the most appropriate protocol that can efficiently perform under a variety of network scenarios based on network simulator 2 (NS-2). The simulated results show that the proposed ACOBMRA outperforms traditional algorithms.