Swarm Intelligence Based Node-disjoint Multi-path Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Ant based routing protocols for MANETs have been widely explored, but most of them are essentially of single-path which tend to have heavy burden on the hosts along the shortest path from source to destination. The robustness of these protocols is comparatively not good which is further weakened by the positive feedback mechanism of ant. Node-disjoint multi-path routing is more robust and can support QoS better than single-path routing in MANETs. In this paper we combine swarm intelligence and node-disjoint multi-path routing to solve the problem mentioned above. A novel approach named Ant colony based Multi-path Routing (AMR) is proposed. AMR establishes and utilizes multiple routes of node-disjoint paths to send data packets concurrently and adopts pheromone to disperse communication traffic, thus it can adapt to the dynamic changes of the network and support QoS better. The simulation results show that the proposed approach outperforms other pertinent algorithms.