Energy Efficient and Effect of Mobility on ACDTN Routing Protocol based on Ant Colony

Delay Tolerant Network is a network that supports the intermittent connections between nodes, there is either no end to end connection between the source and the destination or the connections are infrequent and very short in terms of delay. It was thanks to the mechanism store and forward and node mobility that the nodes can store messages received and wait for an opportunity to transmit them. As traditional routings which are based on the principle of end-to-end are no longer adapted with this type of environment, different routings have been proposed for DTN environment, in order to increase delivery rate of messages with minimal overhead as the Epidemic routing, Spray and Wait and PRoPHET, etc. In this paper, we propose a new routing protocol named ACDTN, inspired from the collective behavior in ants colonies, to find the hops that are more likely to approach the message to it final destination, by combining the information on the time and the geographical coordinates of appointment places (visibility) and the encounters frequency between nodes (pheromone) to compute the transition probability. The new proposed approach has proven through several simulations: an energy efficient and an improvement in the lifetime of nodes compared to the routing protocols, Epidemic, Spary and Wait and PRoPHET, Making it a good candidate for DTN network.