| Along with the appearance of Ad Hoc networks, its future is full of prosperity. Routing protocol is a very important part of the Ad Hoc networks. The already exist routing protocols can be sort into three categories, proactive routing protocol, on-demand routing protocol and ant-like mobile agents, which are all have their own drawbacks. The traditional proactive routing protocol continuously update the routing tables of mobile nodes consuming large portion of the scarce network capacity for exchanging huge chunks of routing table data. The traditional on-demand routing protocol, such as DSR, required the actual communication be delayed until the route is determined, whereas the ant-based routing protocol's inherent drawback is the too much routing overhead and having no route maintenance policy.After analyzing the DSR and ant-like mobile agents routing algorithm, we concluded the complementarities of them, based on which a novel routing scheme for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) DSR-Ant hybrid routing protocol is proposed in this paper. The new routing protocol combines the on-demand routing capability of DSR routing protocol with a distributed topology discovery mechanism using ant-like mobile agents. It overcomes the DSR's shortcomings that may not applicable to real-time data because of the long end-to-end delay and the drawbacks of ant-like mobile agents that having no route maintenance policy and the high routing overhead by making use of the complementarities of them and adding new routing mechanisms to enhance their capabilities and alleviate their weaknesses. Finally, the DSR-Ant has been implemented in the simulation tool GloMoSim. A contrastive simulation between DSR and DSR-Ant was executed. Simulation results show that DSR-Ant hybrid routing protocol is more proper to real-time communication due to its low end-to-end delay and high connectivity. More over, the cost of obtaining the benefits above is only a slightly high routing overhead compared to DSR. |
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