Performance Enhancement of AODV Routing Protocol for MANET Using Genetic Algorithm

Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Networks (MANETs) has gained gigantic attention due to the mobility of nodes, standalone infrastructure, and lack of a centralized arbitrator. These moving nodes make the routing technique highly complex and unstable within a limited radio range. When the network size increases, the length of the complete path increases, and the header size of data packets also increase which brings the network slowdown in operation. To address these issues, many researchers have explored many Artificial Intelligence (AI) techniques to route the data packets from the source to the destination. This paper aims to develop a new routing protocol that exploits the principle of genetic algorithm to find the shortest path from source to the destination. The proposed protocol is experimented through the ns-2 simulator and proves its maximum efficiency over traditional AODV protocol in terms of throughput, average residual energy, and extends the network lifetime at crossover probability 0.5.