Indian Journal of Science and Technology

Abstract

In recent years, Mobile Ad-hoc NETwork (MANET), a flexible and rapidly deployable communication network is widely being used. The mobile nodes often create link changes that demand reconstruction of the already identified routes. The route discovery and the successive route maintenance is performed by the routing algorithm. In order to determine an efficient, robust and scalable routing in MANET, there is a need to develop a routing algorithm that is fully aware of the current network topology and available resources. A multi objective unicast MANET route optimization problem that uses network performance measures such as delay, hop distance, load, cost and reliability is addressed in this study. A multiobjective version of the traditional Ad hoc On-Demand Vector (AODV) routing protocol and an ant based routing algorithm is presented to solve this NP hard problem by employing this objective vector. Simulation is carried out in NS2 and the results revealed that the proposed algorithms yield good results in terms of delay, packet delivery ratio and throughput when compared with the AODV protocol.

Keywords: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO), AODV, MANET, MOAODV, NS2, Routing