An Energy-Aware Routing Protocol for Ad-Hoc Networks Based on the Foraging Behavior in Ant Swarms

Routing in ad-hoc networks can consume considerable amount of battery power. However, as the nodes in these networks have limited power, routing is very much energy-constrained. Continuous drainage of energy degrades battery performance as well. If a battery is allowed to intermittently remain in an idle state, it recovers some of its lost charge due to the charge recovery effect, which, in turn, results in prolonged battery life. In this paper, we use the ideas of naturally occurring ants´ foraging behavior and based on those ideas we design an energy-aware routing protocol, which not only incorporates the effect of power consumption in routing a packet, but also exploits the multi-path transmission properties of ant swarms and, hence, increases the battery life of a node. The efficiency of the protocol with respect to some of the existing ones has been established through simulations.