An Ant Colony Based Multi Objective Approach to Source-Initiated QoS Multicasting Method for Ad Hoc Networks

Multicasting protocols can be used to improve the efficiency of the wireless links in Mobile Ad hoc Networks when sending multiple copies of messages from multiple sources to multiple receivers. In this paper, a Source initiated Mesh based QoS Probabilistic multicast routing protocol (SQMP) for MANETs is proposed. SQMP is inspired from the ant colony’s route finding algorithm in which an ant chooses the best path to its destination while searching the food through the cooperation with other ants. Similar to the behavior of the ant for searching food, SQMP introduces probabilistic forwarding and soft state for making forwarding decisions with QoS satisfaction which are automatically adaptive to mobility of nodes in MANETs. The simulation results indicate that proposed work achieves better packet delivery ratio by finding a feasible multi objective optimized path which satisfies the QoS constraints, bandwidth and end-to-end delay.