A Random Ant-Like Unicast Routing Protocol for Wireless Ad Hoc Sensor Networks and Performance Evaluation

A random ant-like unicast routing (RAUR) protocol is proposed for wireless ad hoc sensor networks. In RAUR, when a source node needs to find a routing path to a destination, it does not flood the network. Instead, the source selects one of its neighbors to send out a route request packet. And the selected neighbor will also select one of its neighbors to forward the packet. The number of nodes to forward the searching message will be reduced. Hence, it could help to save the energy. In addition, the control overhead will be less. In this paper, our approximated mathematical analysis shows that the successful rate in finding a path with only one attempt is considerably high. Our research also shows that the RAUR will get higher successful rate through the larger number of hops. We study the performance of the network using the proposed RAUR by simulation of Glomosim and compare it with the routing protocols, DSR and AODV. The results show that RAUR could outperform in many metrics.