Abstract:

This paper puts forward a routing protocol for mobile Ad Hoc networks called AntBased EnergyAware Routing Protocol (ABEAR), which is based on ant colony optimization (ACO). ABEAR starts the route setup procedure reactively by sending out artificial ants to find paths to the destination node. In the routing computation for data packets, ABEAR considers not only the global information but also the local information of every node, including the pheromone values, the linkquality and congestion metric, and the remaining energy of the next hop. Incorporating these information in the routing computation makes the neighbors with less remaining energy and links with high congestion be less selected. Nevertheless, based on the crosslayer methods, ABEAR turns off the idle network interfaces safely to conserve energy while guaranteeing the basic connectivity of the ad hoc network, and avoids network partitioning. In this way, ABEAR can balance life time and other network performance metrics, including packet delivery ratio and average endtoend delay. The simulation results on the NS2 platform show that ABEAR outperforms AODV (Ad hoc On Demand Distance Vector Routing) greatly in terms of life time, packet delivery ratio and average endtoend delay.

Key words: ad hoc network;ant colony optimization;energyaware routing;network performance tradeoff