A Study On The Intelligent-Water-Drop Based Routing Technique For Manet

Mobile ad-hoc network (MANET), which operates with no pre-setup infrastructure, is one of the most active research fields. This topic is supported by National Science Foundation of China and Important National Science & Technology Specific Projects.A thorough study on the basic architecture reveals that mobile nodes are relatively independent, self-managed and highly dynamic in MANET. Traditional routing protocols cannot therefore work properly in such environment. The Intelligent Water Drop (IWD) algorithm is the newly achieved work in the swarm intelligence field. It simulates the interactive process that the water drop in the natural river performs against the river bed to shape the river channel. This paper proposes an Intelligent Water Drop based algorithm for MANET, which transmits simple packets containing basic IWD properties among neighboring nodes without knowing the topology and the link condition of the whole network. This algorithm features a small traffic overhead, adaptation to the dynamic topology and support for redundant routing. A further simulation shows that the IWD based routing algorithm surpasses the ant-colony-optimization based algorithm with a better convergence speed.The achievement in this paper has certain reference value to the further study of the routing algorithm for the wireless sensor networks.