A New On-Demand Ant-Based Multiagent Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

This paper proposes a new On-Demand Ant-based Multiagent Routing Algorithm (ODAMRA) for Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANETs), which combines the on-demand routing capability of Ad hoc On-demand Distance Vector (AODV) routing protocol with some modifications in the existing ant colony optimization mechanism using ant-like mobile agents. In the conventional AODV algorithms, the actual communication is to be delayed until the route is determined. Therefore, this is not suitable for real-time data as well as multimedia communication applications. The proposed algorithm provides high connectivity, reducing the number of route discoveries before starting new connections. Hence, this may lead to elimination of the delay before starting the actual communication and it can be suitable for real-time communication in MANETs. This paper also compares the performance of new on-demand ant-based multiagent routing with AODV for MANETs by simulation studies. The simulation results show that the new ODAMRA proposed in this paper is able to achieve reduced end-to-end delay as compared to conventional AODV routing protocols. In addition, on-demand ant-based multiagent routing also provides higher connectivity than AODV.