Stigmergy of Ants for QoS Provisioning in Dynamic Ad Hoc Networks

Due to rising popularity of multimedia applications and potential commercial usage of MANETs, support for Quality-of-Service (QoS) is needed in addition to basic routing functionality in such networks. Providing quality of service in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks is not a trivial task due to the resource limitations and dynamic nature of MANETs. This paper presents a novel QoS provisioning scheme mainly inspired by the Swarm intelligence obtained through the stigmergic process found in nature like ant colony. Diffserv like service classes can be made available through this proposed approach. The approach has inherited advantage of robustness and fast convergence from swarm intelligent system, which makes it a better choice over existing QoS algorithms for MANET.