An Ant-Based On-Demand Energy Routing Protocol for Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

In this paper, an improved ant-based on-demand energy routing (AOER) protocol for ad hoc networks is presented. Based on the positive and negative reinforcements and distributed search of ant colony optimization (ACO), the information obtained by ants is stored in an inversed pheromone table which simplifies the data structures of routing packets. The remaining energies of nodes, the energy path cost and hop count are adopted as the metrics to evaluate paths and normalized with an exponent function, the pheromone table is updated with the normalized metrics and nodes with higher pheromone trail values will be selected as the next hop with higher probabilities. Experimental results on NS-2 show that AOER performs well especially in high traffic loads on energy conservation. Paths with more remain energies, less energy costs and less hop count will be selected as routings, therefore the lifetime of network will be extended compared with AODV.