ANSI: A Unicast Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad hoc Networks Using Swarm Intelligence

We present a reactive routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks which uses the mechanisms of Swarm Intelligence to select next hops. Our protocol, Ad hoc Networking with Swarm Intelligence (ANSI), is a congestion-aware routing protocol, which, owing to the self-configuring mechanisms of Swarm Intelligence, is able to collect more information about the local network and make more effective routing decisions than traditional MANET protocols. Once routes are found, ANSI maintains routes along a path from source to destination effectively, without high MAC layer overheads, by using Swarm Intelligence techniques, and is able to gauge the slow deterioration of a link and restore a path along newer links as and when necessary. ANSI is thus more responsive to topological fluctuations. In addition, owing to ANSI’s lower delay jitter characteristics at high loads, ANSI is inherently more suited for certain types of multimedia applications over mobile ad hoc networks. Our simulation study compared ANSI with AODV and the results show that ANSI is able to achieve better or comparable results at lower loads and better results at higher traffic loads as compared to AODV. In addition, ANSI achieves this performance with comparable or better delay and jitter characteristics along with significantly lower consumption of MAC layer resources. Lastly, ANSI is able to perform more consistently, considering the lower variation (measured as the width of the confidence intervals) of the observed values in the results of the experiments.