POSANT: A Position Based Ant Colony Routing Algorithm for Mobile Ad-hoc Networks

Availability of cheap positioning instruments like GPS receivers makes it possible for routing algorithms to use the position of nodes in an ad hoc mobile network. Regular position based routing algorithms fail to find a route from a source to a destination in some cases when the network contains nodes with irregular transmission ranges or they find a route that is much longer than the shortest path. On the other hand, routing algorithms based on ant colony optimization find routing paths that are close to the shortest paths even if the nodes in the network have different transmission ranges. The drawback of these algorithms is the large number of messages that needs to be sent or the long delay before the routes are established. In this paper we propose POSANT, a reactive routing algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks which combines the idea of ant colony optimization with information about the position of nodes. Our simulations show that POSANT has a shorter route establishment time while using a smaller number of control messages than other ant colony routing algorithms.