Modified Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) Based Routing Protocol for MANET

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio. These kinds of networks are very flexible, thus they do not require any existing infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks are suitable for temporary communication links. The biggest challenge in this kind of networks is to find a path between the communication end points, which is aggravated through the node mobility. In this paper we present a new on-demand power-balanced routing algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. These approaches try to map the solution capability of swarms to mathematical and engineering problems. The proposed routing protocol is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. The main goal in the design of the protocol is to reduce the overhead for routing. Our simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol is significantly different from existing protocols.