An Ant Inspired QoS Routing Algorithm for MANETs
Radwa Attia, Rawya Rizk and Mahmoud Mariee
Quality of service (QoS) has become a very dominant factor in MANETs. This paper presents two routing algorithms in MANETs inspired by the ant colony optimization (ACO) routing algorithms. The first algorithm is a Hybrid Multi-Ant (HMAnt) routing algorithm. It combines the features of proactive and reactive algorithms. It solves the more overhead and the long convergence time problems of the ACO algorithms. The second algorithm is a HMAnt with QoS provision (HMAnt-QoS), which sets its goal to find paths that satisfy more QoS requirements of the incoming traffic. A method based on the relative weights of the traffic requirements is proposed to implement HMAnt-QoS. Simulation results show that HMAnt outperform AODV, AntNet, and AntHocNet in terms of end-to-end delay and packet delivery ratio, while having a moderate routing control overhead. HMAnt-QoS achieves its goal by outperforming HMAnt in all terms and providing paths that guarantee the QoS constraints.
Keywords: Ant colony optimization, mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), quality of service (QoS), routing.