Multipath Routing in Mobile Ad-hoc Network using Meta-heuristic Approach

In Ad-hoc networks, routing is complex as nodes are mobile due to which paths are destroyed and generated again and again. The difficulty in MANET is to find a feasible path between communicating nodes as routing is non-deterministic polynomial hard which is due to mobile nature of nodes. Many past works focused on finding a feasible path from a source to destination by considering only a single parameter i.e. the shortest path using hop counts only. This causes path failure due to high node mobility and computed path which may not be available for longer time. So, nodes start path discovery in order to establish connection between communicating nodes. To minimize this overhead, we propose a novel approach for routing in MANET by using Cuckoo Search algorithm (CS) on Ad-hoc Multipath Distance Vector (AOMDV), called CS-AOMDV. This computes the paths with high fitness values so that data packets can be transferred successfully from source to destination by considering routing load in terms of delay, energy efficiency metric and hop count. The cuckoo search algorithm is integrated with AOMDV protocol during the Route Reply (RRPLY) process, where multiple routes are available and maintained at source node having higher fitness values. Through simulation using ns-2, we have observed that our proposed routing algorithm outperforms over AOMDV in terms of delay, packet loss, packet delivery ratio and throughput.