Research of Multi-Path Routing Protocol Based on Parallel Ant Colony Algorithm Optimization in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In the research of routing protocol in the ad hoc networks, single path routing protocol, known as ad hoc on-demand distance vector, has attracted the attention of scholars. At present ants-based routing algorithms have been widely studied because they are suitable for mobile ad-hoc networks where nodes move dynamically and topology changes frequently. Study shows when the number of nodes increases, however, the number of ants (control messages) also increases, which means poor scalability. The proposed routing protocol in this paper applies the parallel ant colony algorithm to establish multi-path routing between source node and destination node, and it improves the packet delivery performance greatly. We also describe the strategy of information exchange and the refresh rules of pheromone in the parallel ACO. In simulation experiments of NS 2.28 the proposed protocol reduces route discovery latency and the end-to-end delay by providing high connectivity without requiring much of the scarce network capacity. Meanwhile the parallel ACO can improve the probability of rout discovery and the speed of constringency is obviously increased in ad hoc networks.