An Ant Colony Based Protocol to Support Multimedia Communication in Ad Hoc Wireless Networks

Multimedia data communication in mobile ad hoc networks involves link un-stability and link-failures. So the existing design of routing protocols failed to achieve a stable QOS. In this paper, we developed an ant colony-based routing protocol for multimedia communications in mobile ad hoc networks. The routing protocol first establishes multiple paths between the source and destination of a data session in a reactive manner. Using ant agents, stable and failure-free paths are determined among the multiple paths, and the multimedia data is send over these paths. During the communication session, these paths are continuously monitored and improved in a proactive manner. By simulation experiments, we show that the performance of the proposed protocol outperforms the standard AODV routing algorithm in terms of end-to-end delay, delivery ratio and jitter.