Bio-inspired routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks

A mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a non-centralised, multihop, wireless network that lacks a common infrastructure. It therefore needs self-organisation. The MANETs are autonomous, adaptive and dynamic. In MANETs, multihop routing allows multiple routes between the source and destination to be established. This study speaks about a bio-inspired routing protocol for these networks based on AntHocNet. The design for the protocol lies in a heuristic, based on swarm intelligence, which takes into account the limited resources and highly dynamic environment, as well as the restriction on the exchange of routing information. So, the key aspects of the proposed protocol are the disjoint-link and disjoint-node routes, separation between the regular pheromone and the virtual pheromone in the diffusion process and the exploration of routes, taking into consideration the number of hops in the best routes which the authors have previously found out. The simulation results show that the protocol has lower overhead and higher delivered packet ratio than AntHocNet. Likewise, these results indicate that the routing satisfies multiple and independent quality of service constraints and can deal with faults, which provides better load balancing.