ANTALG: An Innovative ACO based Routing Algorithm for MANETs

Mobile Ad Hoc Networks (MANETs) are special type of decentralized wireless networks without the need of any pre-existing infrastructure for communication among the nodes. In MANETs, each node participates in routing by forwarding data packets to other nodes, and so the decision about which nodes forward data is made dynamically based on the network connectivity. One of the important issues in MANETs is to establish the efficient routing mechanism for communication among the nodes as these nodes move freely with constant changing topology. So, Efficient optimized techniques are required to keep track of constantly changing topology of the network. Hence, keeping in view of the same, in this paper, we propose an Innovative ACO based Routing Algorithm (ANTALG) by considering a random selection of source and destination nodes and exchanges the Ants (agents) between them. During the movement of ants, the pheromone tables and data structures are created to record the trip time of the nodes. Extensive simulations are performed by varying different parameters to test the effectiveness of the proposed algorithm. The results obtained are compared with two well known Ant based algorithms namely as ADSR and HOPNET and with one traditional, AODV algorithm with respect to various performance metrics such as number of data packets sent, Throughput, End-to-End delay, Jitter and Window Size. The results obtained show that throughput in the proposed ANTALG algorithm is more than in AODV, ADSR and HOPNET. Packet drop has also reduced in ANTALG as compared to AODV and ADSR. Average End-to-End delay is also decreased when compared with AODV, ADSR and HOPNET. Average Jitter in the proposed scheme is reduced when compared with AODV, ADSR and HOPNET. It has also been observed that while transmitting the TCP packets using ANTALG, the proposed algorithm has better window size. (C) 2014 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.