Although ant-based routing protocols for MANETs have been widely explored but most of them are essentially single-path routing methods that have heavy burden on the hosts along the shortest path from source to destination. The robustness of these protocols is comparatively not good which is further weakened by the positive feedback mechanism of ant. Link-disjoint multipath routing is more robust and can support QoS better than single-path routing in MANETs. In this chapter, we present swarm intelligence and link disjoint multipath routing to solve the problem of dynamic routing issues of MANET. A novel approach named Ant Colony Inspired Routing for Mobile ad hoc Networks (QAMR) is discussed. In this approach, forward ants and backward ants are used to determine the paths with QoS properties satisfied. QAMR establishes and utilizes multiple routes of link-disjoint paths to send data packets concurrently and adopts pheromone to disperse communication traffic, thus it can adapt to the dynamic changes of the network and better support for QoS.

Chapter Contents:

• 9.1 Introduction
• 9.1.1 Routing issues in mobile ad hoc networks
• 9.1.2 Need for multipath routing in mobile ad hoc networks
• 9.1.3 Ant colony optimization for multipath routing
• 9.1.4 Performance issues of multipath routing
• 9.2 Background
• 9.2.1 On-demand multipath routing protocols
• 9.2.2 Ant colony-based multipath routing protocols
• 9.2.3 QoS enabled multipath routing protocols
• 9.3 System model
• 9.3.1 Notations
• 9.3.2 QoS model
• 9.3.3 QoS metrics
• 9.3.3.1 Next hop availability
• 9.4 Quality of service enabled ant colony-based multipath routing for mobile ad hoc networks
• 9.4.1 Packet structures of ants
• 9.4.2 QAMR - the algorithm
• 9.4.3 Performance analysis
• 9.5 Further developments
• 9.6 Conclusion
• References

Inspec keywords: protocols; quality of service; swarm intelligence; telecommunication network routing; mobile ad hoc networks; radio links; ant colony optimisation

Other keywords: link disjoint multipath routing; QAMR; swarm intelligence; protocol robustness; QoS; mobile ad hoc network; positive feedback mechanism; single-path routing method; data packet; ant colony inspired routing; communication traffic; MANET

Subjects: Optimisation techniques; Mobile radio systems; Protocols; Communication network design, planning and routing