Design and Evaluation of Load Balanced Termite: A Novel Load Aware Bio Inspired Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Bio inspired computing based on Swarm Intelligence is successful in dealing with the networking problems such as routing, congestion and load balancing by finding an optimal path to the destination. Most of the existing bio inspired protocols for MANETs focused only on the routing problem. In this paper, a novel heuristic bio inspired routing with load balancing algorithm referred to as Load Balanced Termite (LB-Termite) is proposed for MANETs by exploiting the salient features of social insect, “Termites”. The primary objective of the LB-Termite algorithm is to find the stable nodes and thereby giving preferences for these stable nodes during the path setup; thus finding the reliable route to the destination. The secondary objective of the proposed LB-Termite algorithm is to mitigate the stagnation problem by using pheromone heuristic control method. The simulation results of LB-Termite are compared with other state-of-the-art bio inspired routing algorithms (ACO based Simple Ant Routing Algorithm and the Termite algorithm) and non bio inspired (Ad Hoc on Demand Distance Vector Routing Algorithm) routing protocols for its performance evaluation and the results are found to be encouraging.