Performance Analysis of Swarm Based Routing Protocols for MANETs

Abstract

A Mobile Ad-Hoc Network (MANET) is a collection of wireless mobile nodes forming a temporary network without using centralized access points, infrastructure, or centralized administration. To establish a data transmission between two nodes, typically multiple hops are required due to the limited transmission range. Routing is one major task in MANETS. We present ant routing is a new scheme for routing inspired by the behavior of real ants. Real ants are able to find the shortest path to a food source by following the trail of a chemical substance called pheromone deposited by other ants. In ant routing, the ants (control packets) collect information about the network conditions and are used to update and maintain the routing tables. Owing to the striking similarities between self organizing behavior of ant colonies and self-organization in peer-to-peer networks, intelligence of real ants has been largely exploited by researchers to coordinate population of artificial agents that can collaborate to solve routing problems in highly dynamic mobile ad hoc networks. With intent to compare ant based algorithm for mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are delineated in this thesis report. In this, together with the increasing popularity of ad-hoc wireless networks, has given us the idea to adapt ant routing for such mobile networks and determine whether it is suitable or not. A version of this ant routing protocol has been implemented to work within the network simulator NS2. Then, a performance comparison has been done with two well-known ad-hoc routing protocols, i.e. ARA and AntHocNet. Results show that the overhead due to route maintenance is high, so the performance degrades and is inferior to ARA and AntHocNet. However, more simulations in another environment should be done before rejecting this scheme for ad-hoc wireless networks. Each of the routing schemes and algorithms has the common objective of trying to get better throughput and to extend the lifetime of the mobile network. This thesis report first describes brief overview of existed routing protocols in MANETs and their classification. Finally discusses existing Ant Based Algorithms in MANETs, and comparison has been made between two routing protocols, ARA and AntHocNet on the basis of throughput, packet delay and routing overhead.