A Novel Link Reliable Multipath Routing Protocol for MANET

Abstract

Mobile Ad Hoc networks (MANETs) are self configurable wherein mobile nodes communicate with each other via wireless links. Due to ever-changing topology, frequent link failure and lack of fixed infrastructure, it is difficult to develop and maintain an optimal route between source and destination nodes in MANET. In such a network, it is highly required to construct a link reliable route in order to provide an uninterrupted communication. This paper proposes an ant colony optimization (ACO) based link reliable (LR) ad hoc on demand multipath distance vector (AOMDV) routing (ACO-LR-AOMDV) which is inspired from swarm intelligence especially using collective behavior of natural ants. It establishes and maintains multiple routes between a pair of mobile nodes using simulated pheromone deposited by artificial ants. The optimal path is selected based on hop count and minimum value of the Path-Link Quality Estimator (P-LQE) which have been integrated into the pheromone computation of the path. The efficiency of the proposed protocol is examined using the network simulator NS2.34 and the experimental results show the better performance over the well-known multipath routing protocol AOMDV and ACO-AOMDV in terms of end-to-end delay, routing overhead and packet delivery ratio.