Application of Ant Colony Optimization to develop Energy efficient protocol in mobile Ad-Hoc Networks

Foraging Behavior in Ant Swarms can be very helpful when applied to the protocols in Mobile Ad hoc NETworks (MANETs). When the Ant Colony Optimization Scheme (ACO) is applied to a protocol, larger number of paths are generated from the source to destination which helps in improving the packet delivery ratio because an alternate back up path is always available in case a path gets broken due to the mobile nodes. In this paper, we apply the ACO scheme on an already existing Energy efficient protocol Conditional Max-Min Battery Capacity Routing (CMMBCR) (C.-K. Toh, 2001). The CMMBCR not only takes care of the total transmission energy in the network but also the residual battery capacity of the nodes. Hence applying ACO scheme on CMMBCR makes it more efficient in terms of energy, packet delivery ratio etc. The efficiency of our proposed protocol A-CMMBCR is then established by comparing it with some of the other existing Energy aware protocols such as Energy-Aware Routing protocol (EAAR) (Dhurandher et al., 2009), Minimum Transmission Power Routing (MTPR) (Scott and Bambos, 1996) and CMMBCR. The results are captured in the form of a graphical format.