A Survey of Ant Colony Optimization Routing Algorithms in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

A Mobile Ad Hoc NETwork (MANET) consists of mobile nodes that make a temporary network without any fixed structure or centralized management. Because of dynamic nature and topology, finding an optimal route between nodes is a challenge. The Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) approach is inspired by special ant’s behaviour to find the shortest path between a nest and food. Ants leave a substance called Pheromone on the used paths. The ACO algorithms are divided into three general groups, namely proactive, reactive and Hybrid algorithms. The proactive routing algorithms produce the information about all paths between all nodes and maintain it in a table called Pheromone Table. Therefore, these algorithms also called Table Driven algorithms. The Reactive routing Algorithms construct routes only when a source node wants to send information to a destination node. Therefore, they are also called On-Demand routing algorithms. The hybrid Algorithm is a combination of both. In this paper one method in each group will be explained.

Keywords:

Mobile ad hoc network , Routing algorithms , Ant colony optimization