Performance analysis of PBANT (PBANT: Position based ANT Colony Routing algorithm for MANETs)

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio. These kinds of networks are very flexible and thus they do not require any fixed infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks can be deployed easily and used as temporary communication links. The biggest challenge in these kinds of networks is to find a path between the communication end points, which is aggravated through the node mobility. Ant-colony-based routing algorithm (ARA) is an on-demand routing algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. These approaches try to map the solution capability of swarms to mathematical and engineering problems. ARA can find routing paths that are close to the shortest paths even if the nodes in the networks have different transmission ranges. But the algorithm overhead and delay for establishing a path from source to destination is much more for ARA. The position details of the nodes (position of the node, the position of its neighbors, and the position of the destination) can be obtained by positioning instruments such as GPS receiver. If the position details are known, ARA can find out routes with lesser overhead and delay. PBANT is basically ARA where position details of the nodes are known. Here the performance of PBANT is evaluated in terms of delivery rate, delay and control messages needed, for different values of the algorithm parameters.