Energy and Congestion Aware Simple Ant Routing Algorithm for MANET

Routing in Mobile Adhoc network (MANET) is usually constrained by low bandwidth and restricted power. Simple Ant Routing Protocol (SARA) is one of the ant colony routing (ACR) protocols that establishes an optimal path between the communicating nodes. However, while selecting the path, congestion across the link and residual energy of the node is not ruminated. If the nodes within the path have lower residual energy, they will drain off early. This results in a link failure and therefore path between the communicating nodes fail. In addition, when the node is congested, it will drop the packet, resulting in a lower packet delivery. Thus, performance of the protocol can be enhanced by incorporating residual energy and congestion during path selection. Simulation results have made it evident that such a modification can leverage a better performance in terms of packet delivery and throughput of the network.