A Survey of Ant Colony Optimization Based Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Abstract

Developing highly efficient routing protocols for Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs) is a challenging task. In order to fulfill multiple routing requirements, such as low packet delay, high packet delivery rate, and effective adaptation to network topology changes with low control overhead, and so on, new ways to approximate solutions to the known NP-hard optimization problem of routing in MANETs have to be investigated. Swarm intelligence (SI)-inspired algorithms have attracted a lot of attention, because they can offer possible optimized solutions ensuring high robustness, flexibility, and low cost. Moreover, they can solve large-scale sophisticated problems without a centralized control entity. A successful example in the SI field is the ant colony optimization (ACO) meta-heuristic. It presents a common framework for approximating solutions to NP-hard optimization problems. ACO has been successfully applied to balance the various routing related requirements in dynamic MANETs. This paper presents a comprehensive survey and comparison of various ACO-based routing protocols in MANETs. The main contributions of this survey include: 1) introducing the ACO principles as applied in routing protocols for MANETs; 2) classifying ACO-based routing approaches reviewed in this paper into five main categories; 3) surveying and comparing the selected routing protocols from the perspective of design and simulation parameters; and 4) discussing open issues and future possible design directions of ACO-based routing protocols.