Optimized dynamic source routing protocol for MANETs

Mobile ad-hoc networks (MANETs) are wireless networks comprising of small, battery powered mobile devices/nodes. All these nodes communicate cooperatively without fixed infrastructure and able to operate alone or in coordination with wired infrastructure by using gateway nodes. In this work, the performance of optimized dynamic source routing protocol (DSR) is investigated for MANETs. To find the optimal paths between the communicating nodes, traditional DSR algorithm is modified by using the Fire fly algorithm. In recent times a population based method named as Firefly algorithm is stimulated by the surveillance of real firefly and its brightness behaviour. So firefly algorithm is used for the proposed method on MANET which improves the DSR routing performance with well-organized packets transfer from the source to destination node. Optimal route is found based on link quality, node mobility and end to end delay. Simulations are conducted with 25 nodes and the performance of the traditional DSR, link quality based DSR for selecting a route and proposed firefly algorithm for optimal route finding are compared by the parameters such as throughput, end to end delay, number of retransmitted packets and the number of hops to the destination.