A New Approach for QOS Based “Ant Colony Optimization” Routing Protocol In MANETs (QOS-Based ACO)

Abstract

t As the world tends to increase the use of the Mobile Ad hoc wireless Networks (MANETs), a very important challenging issue is to enhance the performance of the used routing protocols. Each of the routing protocols used has some drawbacks on the network performance. However, enhancements to these protocols are needed to increase the network performance; hence a lot of research is done. The use of the mobile agent is one of the promising approaches for enhancing the performance of the routing protocols. When its used in the MANETs along with a traditional protocol, or if it is used in proposing a totally new routing protocol approach, it results in a good enhancement of the network performance most of the time. This thesis proposes a new routing protocol to be used in MANETs based on the ant colony optimization (ACO) algorithm, by taking the quality of service (QOS) parameters in the network into consideration, which are the bandwidth, delay, battery level and the number of hops. The new protocol, which is called QOS based ant colony optimization routing protocol (QOS-Based-ACO), outperforms the ad hoc on demand distance vector routing protocol (AODV) and the ant based hybrid routing algorithm (AntHocNet) when considering the network throughput and average end to end delay.