ANTMANET: a novel routing protocol for mobile ad-hoc networks based on ant colony optimisation

The core aim of this research is to present “ANTMANET” a novel routing protocol for Mobile Ad-Hoc networks. The proposed protocol aims to reduce the network overhead and delay introduced by node mobility in MANETs. There are two techniques embedded in this protocol, the “Local Zone” technique and the “North Neighbour” Table. They take an advantage of the fact that the nodes can obtain their location information by any means to reduce the network overhead during the route discovery phase and reduced the size of the routing table to guarantee faster convergence. ANTMANET is a hybrid Ant Colony Optimisation-based (ACO) routing protocol. ACO is a Swarm Intelligence (SI) routing algorithm that is well known for its high-quality performance compared to other distributed routing algorithms such as Link State and Distance Vector. ANTMANET has been benchmarked in various scenarios against the ACO routing protocol ANTHOCNET and several standard routing protocols including the Ad-Hoc On-Demand Distance Vector (AODV), Landmark Ad-Hoc Routing (LANMAR), and Dynamic MANET on Demand (DYMO). Performance metrics such as overhead, end-to-end delay, throughputs and jitter were used to evaluate ANTMANET performance. Experiments were performed using the QualNet simulator. A benchmark test was conducted to evaluate the performance of an ANTMANET network against an ANTHOCNET network, with both protocols benchmarked against AODV as an established MANET protocol. ANTMANET has demonstrated a notable performance edge when the core algorithm has been optimised using the novel adaptation method that is proposed in this thesis. Based on the simulation results, the proposed protocol has shown 5% less End-to-End delay than ANTHOCNET. In regard to network overhead, the proposed protocol has shown 20% less overhead than ANTHOCNET. In terms of comparative throughputs ANTMANET in its finest performance has delivered 25% more packets than ANTHOCNET. The overall validation results indicate that the proposed protocol was successful in reducing the network overhead and delay in high and low mobility speeds when compared with the AODV, DMO and LANMAR protocols. ANTMANET achieved at least a 45% less delay than AODV, 60% less delay than DYMO and 55% less delay than LANMAR. In terms of throughputs; ANTMANET in its best performance has delivered 35% more packets than AODV, 40% more than DYMO and 45% more than LANMAR. With respect to the network overhead results, ANTMANET has illustrated 65% less overhead than AODV, 70% less than DYMO and 60 % less than LANMAR. Regarding the Jitter, ANTMANET at its best has shown 60% less jitter than AODV, 55% jitter less than DYMO and 50% less jitter than LANMAR