Development of Swarm Intelligent Systems for MANET: ACO based routing in MANETs for effective communication

Abstract

Mobile Adhoc Network MANET is an infrastructure less multi hop network built dynamically for temporary connections It is suitable for applications such as target tracking search and rescue operation disaster relief military applications etc However the MANET architecture poses many challenges due to its dynamic topology mobility error prone shared channel etc Many protocols were developed which aimed at optimizing the routes for data transmission while an attempt was made to retain small message overhead and maximize the network lifetime newlineIt is found that the Swarm Intelligence SI inspired algorithms such as Ant Colony Optimization ACO are better suited for highly adaptive networks like MANETs Biological ants at the time of food foraging navigate their chosen path and deposit a chemical called pheromone on the ground there by establishing the trail Thickness of the trail attracts other ants to follow the path to reach the food source Analogous to this packets in the networks are biased towards the highest pheromone value for its destination while leaving a trail to its source Laying a source pheromone along the same trail increases the possibility of packets travelling the same path in the reverse order to the source To remove stale entries from the network pheromone decreases using decay techniques Pheromone tuning has to be balanced in such a way that stale entries are not retained and at the same time good paths are not lost