Hybrid ACO Routing Protocol for Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Mobile ad hoc networks (MANETs) are formed by wireless mobile devices that do not require a predefined infrastructure and where all nodes are at the same level without the need of a central coordinator. The routing is an important task in this kind of networks because of highly dynamic environments and other characteristics. Routing consists of sending the information from sender nodes to destination nodes in a multihop manner. There are different techniques to solve the routing problem. We rely on bioinspired algorithms, those that take into account the behavior of certain animals to solve it. Specifically we design a novel routing algorithm based on Ant Colony Optimization (ACO) which uses the concepts of Swarm Intelligence and analyzes the behavior of ants at the time of obtaining the food. In this work, we present Hybrid ACO Routing (HACOR), a bio-inspired protocol based on ACO. In the simulation results, we observe how this protocol performs significantly better compared to a state-of-the-art routing protocol, according to the analyzed metrics.