Ant Colony Optimization Based Energy Aware Routing Algorithm For Ad Hoc Networks

A mobile Ad Hoc network is a group of mobile nodes which exchange informationtemporarily by means of wireless transmission. A node in Ad Hoc networks acts as both aterminal and a router. There are many applications for Ad Hoc networks, for example, in amilitary field, rescue operations, or any remote geographical area where is no base station forcommunication.Conventional routing algorithms ignore the residual battery of nodes. The algorithmsinstrumental in route finding in such protocols often result in faster depletion of battery in thenodes that are incident on the heavily used routes in the network, for example, the ones which liein the shortest path routes.Extending battery life of nodes is a critical issue in Ad Hoc networks. In our work, weconsidered the fundamentally important problems of energy-aware routing in Ad Hoc networks.Nature-inspired algorithms (swarm intelligence) such as ant colony optimization (ACO)algorithms have shown to be a good technique for developing routing algorithms for Ad Hocnetworks.In this paper, we use the ideas of naturally occurring ants’ foraging behavior and based onthose ideas, we design an energy-aware routing protocol, which not only incorporates the effectof power consumption in routing a packet, but also exploits the multi-path transmissionproperties of ant swarms and, hence, increases the battery life of a node. The efficiency of theprotocol with respect to some of the existing ones has been established through simulations.