An Efficient Bio-inspired Routing Scheme for Tactical Ad hoc Networks

Abstract

Ad hoc networks are temporary networks, created mainly for applications that are infrastructure-less. Such networks and network nodes demand special characteristics like mobile nodes having dynamic topology, wireless medium, heterogeneous deployment environment, and reactive or proactive routing depending on the nature of the network which includes network parameters such as node placement, mobility model, number of participants in the network, patterns of mobility, etc. Due to these characteristics and the mobility of network nodes, the process of routing is quite challenging in the ad hoc environment, especially when the node mobility is high. Bio-inspired routing can be an effective solution to meet all the design requirements and deal with the issues of tactical ad hoc networks. Different types of nature-inspired routing mechanisms are possible to use for tactical networks. This paper proposes the design of a novel Ant Colony Optimization-based routing strategy for ad hoc networks. Ant-based algorithms are dynamic and have adaptive behavior. Hence, they are competent for routing in ad hoc networks. Our proposed routing scheme is evaluated based on the network’s performance by varying different parameters. The performance of our proposed ACO-based routing approach is also compared to some existing ad hoc routing mechanisms. Different metrics in different deployment scenarios that can affect the efficiency of our proposed protocol are taken into consideration to evaluate the performance.