A novel routing protocol using mobile agents and reactive route discovery for ad hoc wireless networks

This paper proposes a novel routing scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), which combines the on-demand routing capability of ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) routing protocol with a distributed topology discovery mechanism using ant like mobile agents. AODV requires the actual communication to be delayed until the route is determined (found). This may not be suitable for real time data and multimedia communication applications. Ant-AODV provides high connectivity, reducing the amount of route discoveries before starting new connections. This eliminates the delay before starting actual communication for most new connections making ant-AODV routing protocol ideal for real time communication in highly dynamic networks such as MANETs. Simulation results show that the ant-AODV hybrid technique proposed is able to achieve reduced end-to-end delay as compared to conventional ant-based and AODV routing protocols. In addition, ant-AODV also provides high connectivity.