A Dynamic Ant Colony Based Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

In this paper we study the performance of ant colony based routing algorithms in mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) and present SAMP-DSR, a new algorithm to address the shortcomings of both ant colony based as well as the traditional DSR algorithms. Due to the unstable nature of MANETs memory based search algorithms such as ant based methods become inefficient and impractical as the network mobility increases. Our simulations show that ant based routing algorithms suffer from lack of accuracy while incurring extensive memory usage as well as valuable processing power and bandwidth costs in highly dynamic environments. The proposed ANT based routing algorithm exploits a dual-mode approach. Each node can independently operate in a local mode as well as in global mode using the information provided by ants. The network topology changes are constantly monitored. When the rate of topology change gets too high for ants to converge efficiently, a node switches to local mode to rely less on the information learnt through ants. Our simulations show how this switching approach significantly improves the performance of the network by quickly adapting to the dynamics of the environment.