A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio. These kind of networks are very flexible, thus they do not require any existing infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks are suitable for temporary communication links. The biggest challenge in this kind of networks is to find a path between the communication end points, what is aggravated through the node mobility.In this paper we present a new on-demand routing algorithm for mobile, multi-hop ad-hoc networks. The protocol is based on swarm intelligence and especially on the ant colony based meta heuristic. These approaches try to map the solution capability of swarms to mathematical and engineering problems. The introduced routing protocol is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. The main goal in the design of the protocol was to reduce the overhead for routing. We refer to the protocol as the Ant-Colony-Based Routing Algorithm (ARA).

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

A mobile ad-hoc network (MANET) is a collection of mobile nodes which communicate over radio. These networks have an important advantage, they do not require any existing infrastructure or central administration. Therefore, mobile ad-hoc networks are suitable for temporary communication links. This flexibility, however, comes at a price: communication is difficult to organize due to frequent topology changes. The Ant-Colony-Based Routing Algorithm (ARA) is highly adaptive, efficient and scalable. It is based on ant algorithms which are a class of swarm intelligence. Ant algorithms try to map the solution capability of ant colonies to mathematical and engineering problems. In this paper we present some extensions to the basic idea and show through simulation results the performance gain and compare it with AODV and DSR.