A Routing Suite for Mobile Ad hoc Networks using Swarm Intelligence

We present a routing suite for Mobile Ad hoc networks which uses the mechanisms of swarm intelligence to select good routes to destinations. Our suite, Ad hoc Networking with Swarm Intelligence (ANSI) has both proactive and reactive capabilities. In addition, ANSI has been designed with both deterministic routing capabilities, always choosing the best next hop from a selection of possible next hops, and stochastic routing capabilities, taking each possible next hop probabilistically. This paper describes a preliminary design and implementation in which the configurations and routing class in the nodes are not autonomously chosen by the nodes, but are chosen offline. Our simulation study of two reactive configurations of ANSI, a purely deterministic, reactive version and a purely stochastic, reactive version shows that ANSI compares well with AODV and shows better degradation characteristics and better packet delivery with lower network overheads when the traffic load and congestion increase in the network. We see that ANSI also has a better “view” of the network in the sense that routes do not break as often as in AODV, and even though ANSI has a more aggresive route discovery scheme, it shows lower MAC layer overheads as compared to AODV, owing to better managed network resources.