A Hybrid Ant-Colony Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

The dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks makes it difficult to consider a specific model for their topology which might change in a short period of time. Using the knowledge about the location of nodes, several relatively efficient position based routing algorithms have been proposed but almost all of them are sensitive to the network topology. Ant colony optimization based routing algorithms form another family of routing algorithms that usually converge to optimum routes. In our previous work we proposed POSANT, a position based ant colony routing algorithm for mobile ad-hoc networks. Although POSANT outperforms other routing algorithms in most cases, there are network topologies in which POSANT does not perform well. In this paper we introduce HybNet, a hybrid ant colony optimization based routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks which adapts itself to different network topologies. We carry out an empirical analysis of the performance of our algorithm and compare it with other routing algorithms. Our results show that HybNet almost always performs efficiently, even in some complex and variable network topologies.