Nature Inspired Routing in Mobile Ad Hoc Network

Abstract

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is an ad hoc network having inherent flexibility, autoconfiguration, selforganization, self-administration, self-creation, short of infrastructure, little cost, easier deployment, and used for prospective applications. The aforementioned qualities put together in MANETs, as the essence of imminent pervasive computing environments. It is an emergent research field considering routing. As the network topology, bandwidth, and energy efficiency change consistently, designing an effective routing protocol becomes a challenging task in the case of MANETs. This paper provides the basic concepts of wireless networks and an overview of bio-inspired ant colony based routing algorithms for MANETs. Ant colony optimization is based on the probabilistic way to find the shortest path between an ant colony and its food source. A comparison between ant-based routing algorithms such as AntNet (Adaptive routing in ad hoc network), ARA (Ant colony based routing algorithm), and AntHocNet (Ant agents for hybrid multipath routing) is also presented. AntNet uses probabilistic forwarding of data packets using forward and backward ants. In ARA, multiple paths are set by ants in an on-demand manner between source and destination, and AntHocNet is a hybrid combination of both reactive and proactive routing components. In MANETs, nature-inspired routing algorithms are used for proper decision-making, robustness, self-healing, control, coordination, and adaptation purposes.