An ant-based energy-aware routing protocol for ad hoc networks

This paper presents a new routing protocol for ad hoc network called Ant-Based Energy-Aware Routing Protocol (ABEAR), which is based on the Ant Colony Optimization (ACO). ABEAR combines a reactive route setup procedure with proactive neighbor maintenance, and also makes use of route maintenance process. In routing computation for data packets, ABEAR considers the global and local information of every node, including the pheromone values, the link-quality and congestion metric, the remaining energy of the next hop. Incorporating this information in the routing computation makes neighbors with less remaining energy be less selected and reduce waste of energy caused by retransmission or dropping packets. In this way, ABEAR exhibits energy-efficient property and contributes to increase the lifetime of the ad hoc network. The simulation results show that ABEAR outperforms AODV (Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing) in terms of life time, packet delivery ratio and average end-to-end delay, especially in larger topology and heavier load traffic.