Performance Analysis of Optimized ACO-AOMDV Routing Protocol with AODV and AOMDV in MANET

MANET is made up of nodes that uses routing protocols to transfer a packet from source to sink using store and forward method. These packets are sent through each intermediate node as a result, routing the packets is an extremely expensive procedure. Traditional protocols also ignore energy usage in nodes when choosing path from source to destination. These protocols choose a path based on the number of nodes with the least amount of hop and if a single node fails due to a loss of battery power, then entire path will go down and the routing procedure will have to be repeated which results in a delay. As a result, node power consumption and excessive delay tends to the network performance degradation. So, to deal with these problems, a suitable routing protocol for MANETs must be selected. This research work will discuss the routing protocols that are used for the selection of data transfer. The need for an optimum communication path among nodes has prompted the use of optimization techniques like Ant-Colony Optimization (ACO), Particle Swarm Optimization etc. This research paper discusses the concept of ACO in detail and analyze the performance of AODV, AOMDV, and ACO-AOMDV protocols. The performance of a network is analyzed using several metrics such as E2E delay, energy consumption (EC), packet delivery ratio (PDR), and throughput. We use NS 2.35 simulator to conduct this research and Simulation findings reveals that when the nodes size increases gradually, ACO-AOMDV outperformed as compared to other routing protocols in terms of throughput, delay, energy consumption and PDR.