ACRP: Ant-Colony-based Routing Protocol for DTMNs

Delay Tolerant Mobile Networks (DTMNs) focus on scenarios where most of the time contemporaneous end-to-end paths between source and destination do not exist, and mobility should be explored for message delivery. Ant colony optimization is based on reinforcement learning and is adaptive. In this paper, we propose ACRP: an Ant-Colony-based Routing Protocol for DTMNs. In the protocol, the forward ants and backward ants establish the pheromone trail; the data ants make forwarding decision according to the probability function composing both the pheromone and the heuristic information. We present simulation results measuring the performance of ACRP and compare it with other well-known routing protocols.