Bio-Inspired Routing Protocol Based on Pheromone Diffusion in Mobile Ad Hoc Networks

Bio-inspired routing protocols use the principle of swarm intelligence, which finds the optimal path to the destination in a distributed and autonomous way in dynamically changing environments; therefore, they can maximize the routing performance, reduce the control overhead, and recover a path failure quickly according to the change in the network topology. In this paper, we propose a bio-inspired routing protocol for mobile ad hoc networks. The proposed protocol uses a technique of overhearing for obtaining routing information without additional overhead. Through overhearing, a pheromone is diffused around the shortest path between the source and the destination. On the basis of this diffused pheromone, a probabilistic path exploration is executed and the useful alternative routes between the source and the destination are collected. Therefore, the proposed routing protocol can gather up-to-date effective routing information while reducing the control overhead. The simulation results show that the proposed routing protocol outperforms the typical ad hoc on-demand distance vector (AODV) and AntHocNet protocols in terms of the delivery ratio and the end-to-end delay and significantly decreases the routing overhead against AntHocNet.