An Ants Intelligent Routing Protocol for Wireless Mesh Network

For lack of suitable routing protocol, wireless mesh network as a next generation network uses the ad hoc's instead. This paper proposes an ants intelligence routing (AIR) protocol for wireless mesh network by establishing ants agent on each wireless router. AIR agent maintains status of local links by exchanging Hello messages periodically, dispatches ant packets to search for routings on-demand and reverse back to the originator to obtain routings. AIR selects and updates routings based on concept of ants pheromone which is related to real time property of wireless links. Compared with AODV and OLSR, simulation experiments show that AIR has lower overhead, good throughput, acceptable delay and packet delivery ratio, is suitable for WMN with self-organized, self-adaptive characteristics.