Survey of Ant Colony Routing Protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

It is a challenging problem to design the self-adaption, self-organization and self-configuration routing protocols for Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET). Ant colony routing (ACR) is a family of distributed bionic routing protocols based on swarm intelligence. A detailed investigation of the state of the art of ACR protocols is presented. Principle and model of ACR are introduced firstly. According to the pheromone and heuristic information, the research progress of ACR protocols for MANET is also introduced. A few key issues in ACR protocol design are also discussed, including pheromone table, pheromone updating, routing criteria and route selection. Finally, future research directions including hybrid routing protocol, dynamic route selection and cross-layer design are prospected.