Using Particle Swarm Optimization for Enhancing the Hierarchical Cell Relay Routing Protocol

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), the maximum transmission radius is generally used for transmission. The advantage is that each mobile node can communicate with more mobile nodes within the transmission range and packets can reach the destination rapidly in fewer hops. However using the maximum transmission radius will induce high power consumption. We proposed the Hierarchical Cell Relay (HCR) scheme earlier, which is a hierarchical topology routing protocol for the MANETs. In order to enhance the performance of HCR, in this paper we use the Particle Swarm Optimization (PSO) algorithm to find a suitable transmission radius for each node. The nodes do not use maximum transmission radius in order to prolong the network lifetime. In addition to comparing the enhanced HCR with the original HCR, we also compare it to another hierarchical topology routing protocol - Adaptive Cell Relay (ACR). The comparison results show that using PSO in HCR can reduce energy consumption without sacrificing the packet transmission delay.