ACO Based Routing for MANETs

Mobile ad hoc network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes. It dynamically forms atemporary network without using any pre existing network infrastructure or centralized administrationi.e. with minimal prior planning. All nodes have routing capabilities and forward data packets to othernodes in multi-hop fashion. As the network is dynamic, the network topology continuously experiencesalterations during deployment. The biggest challenge in MANETs is to find a path betweencommunicating nodes. The considerations of the MANET environment and the nature of the mobile nodescreate further complications which results in the need to develop special routing algorithms to meet thesechallenges. Swarm intelligence, a bio-inspired technique, which has proven to be very adaptable in otherproblem domains, has been applied to the MANET routing problem as it forms a good fit to the problem.In ant societies the activities of the individuals are not regulated by any explicit form of centralizedcontrol but are the result of self-organizing dynamics driven by local interactions and communicationsamong a number of relatively simple individuals. This unique characteristic has made ant societies anattractive and inspiring model for building new algorithms and new multi-agent systems. In this paper,we have studied and reviewed Ant Colony based routing algorithms and its variants. Finally, aperformance evaluation of the original ARA and the EARA is carried out with respect to each other.