Biologically Inspired Ant-Based Routing in Mobile Ad hoc Networks (MANET): A Survey

This paper presents the state of the art in biologically inspired ant based routing in wireless mobile ad hoc networks (MANET). The motivation for using ant-like mobile agents for providing routing information to mobile hosts in MANETs stems from the fact that ant-like mobile agents do not require high bandwidth overhead compared to MANET proactive routing protocols for disseminating the topology information in the network. The enhanced network connectivity information available at the mobile nodes using ant-like agents in combination with reactive routing approaches can greatly reduce the route discovery latency of reactive routing and allowing subsequent switching to better paths in the network for on-going connections thereby reducing the end-to-end delay experienced by the data packets.