Dynamic Adaptive Routing in MANETS
Authors :
Journal : Student Dissertations
December 01, 2002
Mobile Ad Hoc Networks are infrastructure-less networks consisting of wireless, possibly mobile nodes which are organized in peer-to-peer and autonomous fashion. They are ideal for use in scenarios such as battlefield operations, disaster relief and emergency situations where fixed infrastructure is not available for communications and rapid deployment is important. This environment provides substantial challenges for routing. The highly dynamic topologies, limited bandwidth availability and energy constraints make the routing problem a challenging one. The Swarm Intelligence paradigm is derived from the study of group behavior in animals such as ants, bees and other insects and has been used to solve various hard optimization problems such as the travelling salesman problem and has recently been used in solving the routing problem in static computer networks with encouraging results. These algorithms have proved to be resilient and robust to topology changes. In this thesis we take a novel approach to the unicast routing problem in MANETs by using swarm intelligence-inspired algorithms. The proposed algorithm uses Ant-like agents to discover and maintain paths in a MANET with
dynamic topology. We present simulation results that measure the performance of our algorithm with respect to the characteristics of a MANET, the varying parameters of the algorithm itself as well as performance comparison with other well-known MANET routing protocols.