Tuning the Evaporation Parameter in ACO MANET Routing Using a Satisfaction-Form Game-Theoretic Approach

A Mobile Ad Hoc Network (MANET) is a communication network that links communicating devices (nodes) and does not contain permanent infrastructure. There are no dedicated routing devices in MANETs, in which the routing task is assigned to a routing algorithm installed on all communicating nodes. In this work, communicating nodes utilize one of the most widely used algorithms: Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) routing algorithms. The ACO algorithms aim to balance between exploring new routes for the communication packets vs. utilizing the best-known routes discovered during the communication session. Achieving the optimality in this tradeoff is traditionally set manually by assigning many values to some parameters and measuring the network performance after the simulation session. This manual optimality tuning approach depends on human intuition and does not cope with MANET’s dynamic topology. In this research, we introduce a novel method to find an optimal balance for the exploration-exploitation tradeoff during the communication session. We formulate weighing the benefits of exploring new routes vs. exploiting known ones upon the MANET performance as a game between the two semantic players. This equilibrium is reflected as an optimal value for the pheromone evaporation parameter of the ACO algorithm during the communication session. Experimental results show a higher performance of this online tuning algorithm than the traditional offline tuning algorithms.