Review of ant based routing protocols for MANET

The infrastructureless and the dynamic nature of mobile ad hoc networks (MANET) demands new set of networking strategies to be implemented in order to provide efficient end-to-end communication. These, along with the diverse application of these networks in many different scenarios such as battlefield and disaster recovery, have seen MANETs being researched by many different organizations and institutes. MANETs employ the traditional TCP/IP structure to provide end-to-end communication between nodes. However, due to their mobility and the limited resource in wireless networks, each layer in the TCP/IP model requires redefinition or modifications to function efficiently in MANETs. One interesting research area in MANET is routing. Routing in the MANETs is a challenging task and has received a tremendous amount of attention from researches. Due to the adaptive and dynamic nature, ant based routing algorithms are gaining more importance in routing. This has led to development of many different ant based routing protocols for MANETs. It is quite difficult to determine which protocols may perform best under a number of different network scenarios, such as increasing node density and traffic. In this paper, we have provided an overview of a wide range of ant based routing protocols proposed in the literature.