ENHANCING VARYING OVERHEAD AD HOC ON DEMAND DISTANCE VECTOR WITH ARTIFICIAL ANTS

Abstract

A cluster of mobile hosts installed with a wireless transceiver form a Mobile Adhoc Network (MANET), without base stations. Wireless ad hoc networks routing protocols usually focus on finding paths with minimum hop count. In a MANET, a route may suddenly be broken when a host roams away. Even if a route is connected, it may worsen due to host mobility or a better route being formed new in the system. Current protocols stick to a fixed route between a source - destination pair when discovered and it continues till it expires or is broken. A routing algorithm chooses better paths by considering wireless links quality. However, in large networks link quality from source to destination provides multiple options in space domain and finding local minima is crucial for successful routing implementation. This study extends the Varying Overhead Ad hoc On demand Distance Vector (VO-AODV) by introducing an optimization parameter using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO).