E-MAnt Net: An ACO-Based Energy Efficient Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

In mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs), nodes are mobile and have limited energy resource that can quickly deplete due to multi-hop routing activities, which may gradually lead to an un-operational network. In the past decade, the hunt for a reliable and energy-efficient MANETs routing protocol has been extensively researched. This paper proposes a novel Ant Net-based routing scheme for MANETs (so-called MAnt Net), and an its enhanced energy-aware version (so-called E-MAnt Net), for which the routing decisions are facilitated based on the nodes' residual energy. These protocols were evaluated through simulations using NS2, showing that E-MAnt Net outperforms both MAnt Net and EAODV, in terms of network residual energy, network lifetime, number of established connections, and the number of dead nodes in the network, where E-AODV is an energy-aware version of AODV.