Performance improvement of MANET under DSR protocol using swarm optimization

Mobile Ad hoc NETwork (MANET) is an autonomous, infrastructure-less, self-configuring and self-healing system of mobile nodes connected by wireless links. The nodes are free to move about randomly and may join or leave the network at their will. Due to the mobile nature of the nodes and the unreliable nature of some nodes in a MANET, a critical issue of consistent performance of such a network arises. Here, the concept of routing comes into the picture. Routing refers to the discovery of a reliable-optimal path for data communication between the nodes in a network. The objective of this paper is at describing an optimized method to establish an optimal path between a pair of nodes and detect the misbehaving (selfish, incapable) nodes in MANET. This improves the performance of a routing protocol because in majority of the poor performing networks, the misbehaving nodes are the major cause. To find an optimal path between a set of nodes, DSR protocol has been deployed (using the NS2 simulator) followed by the application of Genetic Algorithm in detecting the selfish nodes. Since the misbehaving node(s) are successfully detected, it proves that the proposed approach is optimal and efficiently improves the performance of DSR protocol significantly. But, sometimes the routes found out by GA are not the ultimate best routes hence to doubly ensure the maximum optimality in the routes found out, ACO (Ant Colony Optimization) has been used.