Adaptive Mechanism for Discovering Internet Gateways in Wireless Networks Using Swarm Intelligence

One of the most critical and challenging processes is the provision of internet connectivity for nodes in Wireless Mesh Networks (WMN) or mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). A wide variety of “business and non-commercial” applications are implemented in MANET, most of them gaining Internet resources. Gateway (GW) or Mesh GWs are the key components of MANET's Internet connectivity, and multiple GWs are implemented to improve MANET's capabilities. Many of the current routing protocols are implemented and improved to work with MANET, either using traditional routing approaches or tree-based network approaches. But since MANET is a complex and transient network, it is very necessary to explore new or tack the GWs failure that adds more overhead on the network. Thus, in this paper a hybrid protocol inspired by the swarm intelligence technique that follows the non-root GWs discovery approach using Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) is suggested. The experimental results validate the processes of exploring new GWs, testing and maintaining existing paths to GWs, exploring different paths to existing GWs and detecting any connection failure in any route, and attempting to fix that failure.